Her Ideal Husband

For a moment he stared at the ball, big, bright red, intrusive, and an unexpected fury boiled up in him. People were so damned careless. Didn’t they know, didn’t they understand how long this had been here? Care about the generations of men who’d spent their lives working, harvesting, loving the place as he did?

He shook the glass out of his hair, carefully peeled off his T-shirt, then bent to pick up the ball, intent on telling the idiot who’d kicked it without a thought for the consequences, exactly what he thought of him.

‘Mummy, Clover’s kicked the ball over the wall again!’

At the most trying stage of refitting the handle to a freshly painted door, Stacey couldn’t do much about her youngest daughter’s plaintive cry, other than put her on hold.

‘Tell her she’ll have to wait,’ she called back as she tried to juggle the handle and the screwdriver at the same time as fitting a screw with a life of its own into the hole. There were times, she felt, when two hands were simply not enough. But then, she had never been much use at this sort of thing.

Give her something solid to work with, a spade or a hoe, and she was perfectly at home. She could double-dig a vegetable plot, build a compost heap without raising a sweat. But put a screwdriver in her hand and she was all fingers and thumbs.

Not just a screwdriver. She wasn’t much use with a paintbrush. There was more paint on her clothes and her skin than there was on the door.

‘Mummy!’

‘What?’ The screw took advantage of this momentary distraction to make an escape bid. It hit the quarry-tiled floor, bounced once and disappeared beneath the dresser. Stacey only had four screws, the ones she’d taken out of the door plate when she’d removed it. Now she’d have to strip the dresser of china before she could move it and retrieve the wretched thing. Great. She dug screw number two out of her pocket, then remembered that her daughter wanted her for something. ‘What is it, Rosie?’

‘Nothing.’ Then, ‘Clover says not to worry, she’ll climb over and get it herself.’

‘Right,’ she muttered, through teeth clamped around the handle of the screwdriver. If she could just get one wretched screw in place everything would be easier. She jammed it hard into the hole so that it stayed put while she retrieved the screwdriver and then realised what Rosie had said. ‘No!’

As she spun round to make sure she was obeyed, the metal plate pivoted on the screw and gouged an arc out of the freshly painted surface.

For a moment Stacey stared at the scarred paintwork, too shocked even to let slip the kind of word that mothers weren’t supposed to know, let alone say.

Actually, she felt like screaming, but what would be the point? If she succumbed to the temptation to give in to her feelings and scream every time something went wrong, she would be permanently hoarse. Instead she dropped the screwdriver back into the toolbox, took a deep breath and, doing her best to keep calm, walked out into the garden.

It was not the end of the world, she told herself. She would get there one day. She would finish the kitchen. She would tile the bathroom. She would fix the guttering and decorate the dining room. She would do it because she had to. The house was unsellable the way it was. She’d tried it.

People might turn their noses up at twenty-year-old wallpaper, but there was the challenge to make a house over in their own image. Half-finished jobs just turned people off.

If only Mike had ever finished one thing before he’d started something else. But that had been Mike. There was always tomorrow. Except that he’d run out of tomorrows...

‘Mummy! Clover’s doing it!’ Rosie’s yell wrenched her from the beckoning arms of self-pity and she set off down the garden at a run.

Clover, nine years old and growing like a weed, had shimmied up the apple tree and was now dangling by her long skinny arms from the high brick wall that bordered the rear of the garden.

‘Clover O’Neill, get down from there this minute!’

Clover glared at her younger sister, muttering something unappreciative at her, but she did as she was told, dropping from the wall and flattening a couple of foxgloves in the process.

‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to straighten them.

Stacey just sighed, picked the flower stems and firmed the ground around the plants. The advantage of growing what most of her neighbours sniffily considered to be weeds was that they could take pretty much everything that two lively children could throw at them. ‘What on earth do you think you were doing up there?’

‘You said not to disturb you while you were fixing the door, so I was going to get the ball myself.’ She said this as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world. Clover could have won Olympic gold for ‘reason’.

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, sweetheart, but I’d have been a lot more disturbed by a broken leg,’ she reasoned right back, firmly suppressing a shudder. The wall was a couple of hundred years old at least and in some places it was held together by little more than the mossy stonecrop that clung to it. ‘You are never—I repeat, never—to climb on that wall. It’s dangerous.’ Her daughter rolled her eyes, dramatically. ‘I mean it!’

‘But how are we going to get our ball back?’ Rosie asked.

Clover glared at her little sister. ‘If you’d kept your mouth shut, we’d have it back now.’

‘That’s enough. Both of you. You’ll get your ball.’ They’d get it the same way they always did. She would climb over when they weren’t around to see the bad example she was setting them. ‘I’m sure someone will see it and throw it back. They did last time.’

‘But that could take for ever,’ Rosie protested. ‘No one goes in there any more, not since it closed.’

It was true that the garden centre that backed onto their garden was rapidly turning into a wilderness since ill-health had forced Archie Baldwin, the old guy that ran it, to retire a couple of years earlier.

She must find time to go and visit him again soon, she thought guiltily. He’d taught her so much. The least she could do was take him a tin of shortbread, tell him all the latest gossip from the village. And maybe ask him about the depressing rumour going round the neighbourhood that he’d sold the land to a developer.

It would be a lot easier to sell her house if the views could be described as rural.

Attractive detached Victorian cottage-style property in village setting with scope for improvement. Interesting wild flower garden.

It sounded appealing. Until you saw it and understood exactly what ‘scope for improvement’ meant. How much money it would take. And, as her sister was fond of pointing out, most people tried to eradicate buttercups and daisies from their borders.

But the garden really wasn’t the problem. It was the house. The estate agent she’d asked to value the place hadn’t pulled any punches. The house needed some serious attention if it was going to make anywhere near the price it should and a housing estate blocking the view was not going to help. Or light industrial units. Maybe she should stop worrying about her precious wild flowers and plant a fast-growing hedge right now...

‘Mum!’

She let go of future worries and returned to the immediate one. ‘I’m sorry, Clover, but you shouldn’t have kicked your ball over there in the first place.’

‘You can’t play football without kicking,’ Clover pointed out, but kindly, as if to someone who wasn’t expected to understand. ‘Come on, Rosie. Mummy’ll get it for us; she always does. She just doesn’t want us to see her climbing over the—’ she made a sign like quotation marks ‘—great big dangerous wall.’

‘Clover O’Neill, that’s—’

‘It’s no use pretending, Mummy. I saw you last time.’

Stacey was not above circumventing the truth in a good cause, but there was no point in perjuring herself to no purpose, so she didn’t deny it, contenting herself with a firm, ‘You were supposed to have been in bed.’

‘I saw you from the bathroom window,’ Clover said, cheekily, and grinned. ‘You will get it, won’t you? Now?’

Since she’d been caught out, there seemed little point in waiting until the girls were in bed. ‘All right. But I mean it. You are not to do this yourself, ever. Promise?’

‘I promise.’ And Clover solemnly drew a cross over her heart. Just the way Mike used to when he promised he’d fix something tomorrow. Just the way he used to promise he’d take care when he went out on his motorbike...

Stacey swallowed. ‘Okay.’ She dropped the flowers, then approached the wall, jumped and grabbed the top, pulling herself smoothly up to sit astride the crumbling brickwork.

The derelict garden centre had once been the walled kitchen garden of a grand house that had long since been turned into the headquarters of some multi-national corporation.

From the top, she could see the south wall and the ancient espaliered peach trees. There were a couple of big old greenhouses that had lost a fair amount of glass in a bad storm. Until then, she’d used them to raise her own seedlings. Well, Archie had told her to help herself.

Now it all looked so sad, grown wild with frightening speed and run to a riot of weeds that were beginning to flower in the gravel paths and between great clumps of perennials that had burst out of plastic pots and made themselves at home.

She glanced back down at the girls. ‘Stay there and don’t move,’ she said, then jumped down into a mini-meadow of buttercups and dog daisies and began to look about her for the girls’ ball.

It was big and red and should have been easy enough to find. The trouble was, she kept getting distracted. First by a clump of poppies with scarlet silken petals. Great. She’d come back for some seeds later in the summer. If she was still there later in the summer. Maybe she would have sold the house by then. Or maybe not.