‘Too frenetic,’ Phil said, frowning thoughtfully, ‘and too …’
‘Superficial,’ I continued and he smiled. Heavens, we were finishing each other’s sentences now.
He favoured Kent, where his mother lived, but I wanted to be near Dad, so we looked at villages in that direction, within an hour’s commute of town. Eventually we decided, somewhat sheepishly, that Jennie and Dan really had done their homework. That it was hard to better theirs. Sleepy, idyllic, with two pubs and a duck pond, but a functioning village too, with a shop and a school.
‘But do you mind?’ I asked her anxiously, when a house at the other end of the village had come up for sale.
‘Mind?’ Jennie shrieked down the phone. ‘Of course I don’t mind, I’d love it!’
She had made one friend, she told me, a lovely girl called Angie, frightfully glam and rich and great fun, but apart from that was bereft of kindred spirits, and couldn’t think of anything nicer than having her best friend down the road. For moral support if nothing else, she said grimly, which she needed at the moment, what with dealing with daily tantrums from Frankie, and Dan’s increasing inability to pass a second-hand car showroom without buying a banger – they were a four-car family at present – which he drove at speed down the country lanes, parp parping like Toad. Not to mention the dawning realization that she appeared to be pregnant.
Unfortunately the house at the other end of the village fell through, but then she rang me to say there was one for sale next door.
‘Bit close?’ I said doubtfully. ‘I mean, for you, not me. I don’t want to – you know, cramp your style?’
‘Trust me, I don’t have a style. Unless you count heartburn that makes me belch mid-sentence, or piles that have driven me to adopt the post-natal rubber ring two months prematurely. Please come, Poppy, before I change the e in antenatal to a vowel I regret.’
I shot down to look at the house: a dear little whitewashed cottage, low-slung, as if a giant had sat on the roof, with bulging walls, a brace of bay windows downstairs – one on either side of the green front door – two more poking out under eaves, a strip of garden that gave onto farmland at the back and the forest beyond. It was attached to Jennie’s similar cottage on one side, and next to a sweet terraced row on the other. Inside was a mess: low, poky rooms and an outdated kitchen and bathroom, but Phil and I decided we could knock through here, throw an RSJ up there, just about have room for an Aga over there. ‘And lay a stone hallway here,’ he said, indicating six square feet just inside the front door.
‘Yes!’ I yelped, thinking how uncanny it was that I’d been thinking the same. ‘Limestone or slate?’ I asked, hoping for the latter.
‘Slate, I think,’ he said thoughtfully, and I almost purred.
We moved in, already engaged, and, once the structural work had been done, got to work. We stripped the walls together, sanded doors, rubbed down floorboards, re-enamelled baths, working every weekend, evenings too, radio blaring so not much chat, whilst Dan and Jennie, who’d got a team of decorators in to do theirs, popped round to marvel. Jamie was in Jennie’s arms now and Frankie was still sucking her hair and scowling. Well, of course she was, Jennie said staunchly; her mother might have drunk too much and run off with an Argentinian polo player, but she was still her mother, for crying out loud. She missed her.
So Phil and I scrubbed and varnished and stippled and dragged, and even found a window of opportunity one Saturday to get married, arranged with military precision by Phil, both of us agreeing on the music, the number of people, the flowers; as I say, the only fly in the ointment was the tandem to go away on, the surprise googly, as it were. Another year of tireless house restoration followed before we sat back on our weary heels and looked at each other, delighted. With the house, at least. But I do remember, as I regarded Phil that day, spry and fair, putty scraper in hand, slightly narrow lips which didn’t smile that often, remember looking at him as if I hadn’t seen him for some time, had seen only Designers Guild samples, Farrow and Ball paint charts, and it being … quite a shock. As if I’d taken a year-long nap. Was this my husband? This man, so free of jokes and wit and laughter, but full of plans for the garden? This man who had ideas for opening up the inglenook fireplace, growing roses round an arbour – both romantic notions, I felt – but who made love so quickly and quietly, almost … stealthily? Who was disinclined to linger in bed afterwards but wanted to get those tulip bulbs in, wanted to get on?
Joyless was a word horrifyingly close to my lips. And as I sat on my heels and looked at him and he asked if I’d ordered the bedroom carpet, and I replied I hadn’t yet, he held my eye. ‘That’s the second time I’ve had to ask you, Poppy,’ he said slowly. I went a bit cold.
‘There’s a sample in the kitchen drawer,’ he went on. ‘In the file marked Floor Coverings.’