One Hot Summer: A heartwarming summer read from the author of One Day in December

Niamh shook her head. ‘Nope, but I did it anyway. You need more pictures of Brad the Cad and Felicity-no-knickers like you need a hole in the head.’

‘But …’ Although Alice knew that Niamh was right, anxiously scouring the papers and magazines for images of him had become part of her post-Brad daily routine. He’d taken out a costly subscription to all of the nationals when they’d moved to Borne; Brad had taken pleasure and pain from searching for mentions and reviews of his performances.

This was just another form of that, really. Alice didn’t enjoy it. In fact she had to brace herself for it and her shoulders didn’t drop from around her ears until she’d closed the last page of the last newspaper, but in another way she kind of relied on it, in the same strange way you can come to rely on visiting a sick relative in hospital because the alternative of losing them altogether is even worse. By cancelling the papers, Niamh had kicked the power cable out of the life support machine of her marriage. She’d argue, but Alice knew that any doctor in the land would have pronounced it dead anyway.

‘But what?’ Niamh said, leaning down to find a stick to throw for Pluto, her rescue dog turned loyal companion. ‘You’d rather torture yourself slowly than go cold turkey? If I had a bullshit buzzer I’d press it right now, Alice.’

They both watched an ecstatic Pluto hurtle down the frosty lawn and career off towards the woods in search of the stick. He’d be gone a while. He was the dearest of dogs, but he was blind in one eye and his good one wasn’t brilliant.

‘I bet Davina had a field day, didn’t she?’ Alice muttered, picturing the owner of the local shop-come-post-office. Dark haired and sly eyed, Davina was the village ear to the ground and man-eater. There was always talk of scalps on her bedpost amongst wronged wives after a few gins in the local. She wasn’t exactly what you might call a girls’ girl; she’d happily gossip with mums at the school gate in the morning and try to bed their husbands in the afternoon. She’d had plenty of cracks at Brad since they’d moved into Borne Manor a little over eighteen months ago, a fact which he’d always reported back with glee to Alice. She hadn’t been concerned, back then. The fact that he told her all about it meant he wasn’t interested, right? Looking back, Alice wasn’t so sure. Maybe if Davina had caught Brad at a weaker moment he might have accepted more than a book of stamps and a punnet of strawberries.

Niamh laughed beside her. ‘Oh, she tried to fish. All doe eyed, twisting her hair around her fingers as she asked after you and Brad. Proper concerned she was.’

Alice sipped her coffee and watched Pluto mooch about at the edge of the woods. The gardens and land that came with Borne Manor had been one of its big attractions; Alice had imagined kids building forts and camping in the woods, and Brad had pictured rolling garden parties and summer balls attended by the rich and famous. He was a man who’d let his fledgling fame go straight to his head – in his mind’s eye he was already one good dinner jacket away from David Frost. Pushing all thoughts of her errant husband to the back of her mind, Alice dwelled instead on the worrying red letter that had arrived a few days ago in the mail.

‘I might lose this place, Niamh,’ she said, facing facts as she cupped her hands around her mug for warmth against the March morning. ‘The bank letters are coming thick and fast, and Brad isn’t happy to keep paying the mortgage indefinitely. I can’t possibly pay it. I don’t even have a sodding job.’

‘So divorce him and use the settlement. Ask the bank to wait.’

‘You know that won’t happen soon enough. Even if I saw a solicitor today it’d drag on for months.’ She didn’t mention that she wasn’t ready to start divorce proceedings. Divorces needed strength, and she couldn’t see herself feeling very Fatima Whitbread for a while yet.

‘Is there any chance that Brad might try to take the house?’

‘Over my dead body,’ Alice shot back, even though she had no clue how she’d stop him if he actually tried. This was her house. It might have both their names on the deeds, but she knew every brick and slate, she loved every nook and cranny. She knew its history and its stories, because she loved the place enough to find out. From the moment she’d set eyes on Borne Manor, she’d wrapped her heart around its mellow stone walls and vowed to love it for ever. Much like her wedding vows, really. The difference was that Brad had let her down. Borne Manor hadn’t, and she wanted to repay it in kind.

Quite how she was going to do that though was anyone’s guess.

‘How long do you have?’

Alice shrugged unhappily. ‘Two months, maybe?’

Niamh sucked in a sharp breath of cold air. ‘We better think of something fast then.’

We. Not you, we. Not for the first time in the last few months, Alice found herself grateful for Niamh’s friendship. They’d been neighbours ever since Alice and Brad moved to Borne, but it was only since Brad’s departure that their friendship had blossomed beyond the occasional coffee in the village or chat at the gate. She’d knocked on the door of Borne Manor and asked if Pluto could possibly go for a run in the gardens as it was safer for him than being on the common, and she’d been around most mornings since at sun up for an early morning coffee on the back bench and an hour setting the world to rights. Alice suspected that word had reached Niamh’s ears of her troubles and she’d reached out to help; she was that special kind of person. In actual fact they weren’t neighbours, exactly; as owner of the row of four tied cottages next to the manor, Alice was officially Niamh’s landlady. Not that she went along the row and collected rent; specified arrangements with most of the cottage owners had been included as part of the sale particulars.

Number one housed Stewie Heaven, ex seventies porn star, a perma-tanned man who seemed to have a wig to suit every occasion. Alice had only seen him on hops and catches as he wintered in Benidorm, but from what Niamh said he’d arrived home a week or so ago and was as verbose as ever about his exploits. He paid rent to Borne Manor at the princely sum of one pound a month, a nefarious peppercorn arrangement with the previous owner for services rendered. No one knew the precise nature of the services, and no one had the stomach to ask.

Hazel lived at number two, a woman as round as she was tall and who told everyone who cared to listen that she was a practising witch. She lived with her sofa-surfing son Ewan, a perpetual student, and Rambo, her talking mynah bird, who could often be found perched on her open windowsill shouting obscenities at passersby. Hazel paid double Stewie’s rent at two pounds a month, secured on the basis that she’d cleared the manor of an unwanted poltergeist some twenty years previously.

Which left just Niamh, who’d returned to Borne to nurse her ailing mother after a stroke last summer and stayed on after she died a couple of months later. It was written into the sale of Borne Manor that Niamh’s mother and any of her surviving children should be allowed to live rent free in number three until such a time as they no longer wanted or needed to. There was no explanation offered, and Alice saw no reason to question it. Brad had wanted to when news reached him of Niamh’s mother’s death, but Alice had uncharacte‌ristically put her foot down and refused to allow it. She was glad every day now that she’d made a stand; Niamh had turned out to be the perfect friend in her time of need.

The end cottage, number four, presently stood empty after the passing of Borne’s most senior resident, Albert Rollinson, who Hazel assured them now haunted the row of cottages in spirit form, stealing their morning papers to check the runners and riders at Aintree. Fond of a bet and a pint, if Albert was there at all he was the most benign of ghosts. He’d make Casper look angry. Freed of its peppercorn rent arrangement with the death of Albert, the estate agent had secured a buyer for the tiny two up two down and agreed a sale a couple of months back, but as of yet no one had moved in.

‘Pluto!’ Niamh called, putting her cup down on the cobbles and standing up. ‘Here, boy! I better shoot. I’ve got a sitting this morning, some farmer from three villages over who wants a painting of himself naked for his wife’s birthday. Where would a man get the idea that any woman wants that?’

Alice laughed despite her gloom. ‘Maybe you could offer him a strategic bunch of bananas or grapes to drape himself with. Tell him it’s arty.’

Niamh huffed as she leaned down to clip Pluto’s lead on. ‘I don’t have bananas. Or grapes. Do you think he’d be offended if I suggested an out-of-date fig?’

‘His wife probably wouldn’t notice the difference,’ Alice said, making them both laugh softly as she opened the side gate for Niamh. ‘Call me if he gets frisky. I’ll come over with the contents of my fruit bowl.’

‘No worries on that score. I’ve got my bodyguard to protect me.’ Niamh fussed Pluto’s wiry head and he rolled his good eye towards Alice in farewell.

‘See you tomorrow. Same time same place.’

‘It’s a date,’ Niamh called over her shoulder, raising her hand as she disappeared down the road towards the cottages. Alice closed the gate slowly and returned to the bench, sitting down to watch the rose pink and gold clouds that streaked the early morning sky. One of her favourite parts of the day was already behind her and it was barely breakfast time.

Would it always feel like this? Would every day always be a new mountain to climb? Mount Kilamancal‌ledBradfor‌breakingmyheart might not roll easily off the tongue, but it was there on the map of Alice’s life and its recent eruption threatened to leave her homeless.

Bending to pick up the empty mugs, Alice looked out over the rolling gardens towards the woods. Through the trees she could see silvery glints of the vintage Airstream caravan she’d impulse bought on eBay last autumn with the intention of giving it a kitsch make-over for weekends away with Brad. His celebrity life made it difficult to go to hotels and cities without him being noticed, so she’d harboured hazy images of them camping out in the Airstream, maybe even taking it over to France for long weekends of wine and cheese and sex. The sight of it made her heart heavy these days. Maybe she could live in it if the bank repossessed the house, claim squatters rights in her beloved garden. Sighing, she turned and headed back into the warmth of the kitchen.

Sliding ready-made lasagne for one onto the kitchen table, Alice placed the most alcoholic bottle of wine she could find and a glass beside it and sat down, the tick of the kitchen clock the only sound in the too quiet, too big kitchen. It hadn’t seemed that way when she lived here with Brad; the kitchen had been the central hub of their lives and one of the rooms she loved best of all.

But then it had also been the room where the ugly end scenes of her marriage had played out too; the traded insults, the wall that had needed repainting after Alice hurled a cup of coffee at Brad and only just missed. She liked to tell herself that she’d intended to miss, but he sure had gone from bringing out the best in her to the worst in her in a very short space of time.

If this were a movie, Alice could see herself sitting alone at this table, a solitary figure as the end credits rolled and cinema goers were left bereft of their happy ending. Maybe it was melodramatic to cast herself as the crazy cat lady already given that she was still shy of her thirtieth birthday, but some days she really did just want to give it all up and go and sit in the attic in her wedding dress until the cobwebs choked her.

Picking listlessly at the pasta, Alice’s gaze slid to the unopened pile of bills. Ignoring them wasn’t helping, she knew that. She’d eat this cardboard dinner, and then she’d be brave and open them, because just the sight of them was making her feel ill and that was no way to go on. Flicking the TV on for dinner company proved little solace. EastEnders blared from BBC1, all garish lipstick and shouty arguments in the Queen Vic, and Alice had a self-imposed ban on Central in case Brad and Felicity unexpectedly appeared and scorched her eyeballs out with their passionate on-screen clinches. That left her with a straight choice between a nature documentary about hedgehogs or yet another re-run of The Good Life. She went for the latter, and ended up thinking how lovely Tom was to Barbara even though they didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and remembering how much happier she and Brad had been before he got famous and switched his wellington boots for Armani ones.

Pushing her dinner away and pulling her wine towards her, Alice laid her head on the table and allowed herself to indulge in a few tears. And then she poured a second glass of wine and cried some more; bigger, snottier, shoulder-shaking sobs that made her knock her drink back too quickly and refill her glass for a third, ill-advised time. Within the hour she was at her own pity party for one, which frankly beat the pants off her lonely, sober dinner for one, or at least it did for the glorious half an hour when she turned the radio up loud and wailed along to any sad song she could find on the dial.

When the bottle was finally as empty as her stomach, Alice flopped back into the chair again, her cheek on the dining table, her eyes closed because all she could see when they were open was that humungous, frightening pile of bills again. If I close my eyes, it might disappear, she thought. She’d heard all about positive thinking from Hazel down at the cottages. Maybe if she wished really, really hard, they’d be gone when she opened her eyes. Alice tried. She really did give it her very best shot, which only served to make it an all crushing blow when she opened her eyes and found the pile of bills still there, even bigger than when she’d closed her eyes, if that was even possible.

Any traces of wine-fuelled high spirits abandoned her there on her kitchen table, as did her resolution that she could find a way to hold onto her beloved manor.

As she fell into a heavy, troubled sleep she thought for the second time that day of the Airstream in the garden. Only this time, she saw herself living in it on a muddy campsite like a scene from My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and all of her new gypsy friends coming out with sticks and big growly dogs to defend her whenever Brad the terrible turned up in his Range Rover and poncey Armani boots.

‘I’m going to live in the caravan.’

Niamh looked at Alice as if she’d just said she was planning to fly to the moon and should be back in time for lunch. Alice just nodded, her eyes trained on the edge of the woodland and the caravan that lay beyond.

‘It came to me yesterday after you left.’

Niamh frowned. ‘I only cancelled your newspapers, Alice, not your whole life. Have you had a knock on the head?’

‘I’m serious, Niamh. I thought about it all day yesterday and it might just work.’

It was more of an economy with the truth than an actual lie. She hadn’t thought of it yesterday, she’d thought of it at about four o’ clock that morning as she’d peeled her cheek from the dining table and made her way blearily up to bed. Her dreams had been full of the Airstream, muddled and messed up, but they’d sown the seed of a more plausible idea that had gripped her from the moment she’d properly woken up.

Pluto dropped his ball at Niamh’s feet and she picked it up and hurled it across the grass. ‘You’re going to have to spell this out. I’m not seeing how you moving into the caravan will help.’

‘Because if I live in the caravan, I can rent the house out to someone else to pay the mortgage.’

Niamh paused. ‘Are you allowed to do that?’

A frown creased Alice’s brow. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I don’t know … I just thought there were rules around that sort of stuff.’