Summer at Hollyhock House Read online

  SUMMER AT HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

  Cathy Bussey

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Chapter 1

  ‘Happy birthday!’

  Faith smiled dutifully as Joanna thrust a tastefully-wrapped parcel into her hands. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Sorry we’re late.’ Joanna gestured at Eddie, who was shaking hands with Rob and muttering something about traffic. ‘We got caught in the most awful tailback.’

  Faith nodded, not really listening, as Rob’s best friend’s fiancée continued to explain the diversion they had taken in exhaustive detail. ‘It was more of a long-cut than a short-cut,’ she laughed, and Faith trilled along like she had never heard anything so funny.

  ‘You’re just in time for cake.’ Rob ushered them into the flat. At the table — a white, plasticky identikit IKEA model with an implausible name, Shlaghaarten perhaps — Rob’s friends Kate and Oliver were deep in discussion with his sister Sophia and her new boyfriend, who Faith thought was called Kev but it could have been Keith. ‘We book on January 1 every year,’ Kate was saying, ‘that way we have something to look forward to.’

  Rob disappeared into the kitchen and Faith half hoped he would stay there. She wasn’t sure she could cope with another conversation about holiday destinations or property prices and the merits of new-builds versus project houses. ‘But then you have to put up with workmen invading your space for an indefinite period,’ Rob had sighed and Faith had disloyally thought that a house full of wisecracking labourers would brighten her day up quite considerably.

  ‘I don’t like new-builds,’ she had grumbled.

  ‘Faith grew up in a village,’ Rob had explained to Keith or Kev or maybe it was Ken, rolling his eyes. ‘She doesn’t feel at home unless there’s a rackety wind gusting through the place. Every day when I come home from work she’s got all the windows open, and I have to go round shutting them.’

  ‘Actually my parent’s house isn’t draughty,’ she had corrected. It was stuffy and airless.

  Suffocating, like this place.

  Rob turned off the lights in the living room and came through holding a cake ablaze with pastel-coloured candles, illuminated like a miniature bonfire.

  ‘Make a wish!’ he urged as she blew them out.

  I wish I could stop being so ungrateful, Faith thought, and then she thought she probably wished nothing of the sort, she just wished she was anywhere but here.

  ‘How’s the wedding planning going?’ she asked Joanna as Rob cut the cake.

  Joanna frowned. ‘We’ve hit a glitch with the flowers.’ She launched into a long and tedious explanation. ‘We’ll end up with nothing but a bunch of cactuses at this rate.’

  ‘Cacti,’ Faith said. ‘Succulents.’ They were succulent too, crazy and often phallic water-filled shapes with spines sticking out in all directions, refusing to allow all but the brave access to their beautifully soft, malleable interior.

  Joanna didn’t seem interested in discussing the mild onomatopoeia of succulence, so Faith turned her attention back to the cake.

  ‘You next.’ Joanna nudged her meaningfully.

  Faith watched Rob fussing with the plates. He had some vanilla icing on his thumb, and he wiped it fastidiously on a paper napkin, carefully removing every trace. Rob’s forehead beneath his sandy fringe was furrowed and his pale blue eyes were framed with equally pale sandy lashes. He was kind and considerate and pragmatic and they plodded along together quite easily, sharing few common interests but a comforting , routine-based rapport. She knew that after everybody had gone Rob would painstakingly plough through the piles of washing up before settling down on the sofa next to her to watch a movie of his choice and falling asleep twenty minutes in. Netflix and no chill, she thought wryly.

  ‘We’re saving for a house,’ she said. ‘No money for a wedding at the moment.’

  Did she want to marry Rob?

  Faith didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘Now then,’ Rob announced, and Faith could tell by the way his left leg was tapping furiously against the floor that he was nervous about something. ‘There’s just one more thing.’

  He dug around in his pocket again. Faith gulped.

  Time seemed to slow down. The flickering light from the candles blurred together into a wavy haze of orange and yellow, tiny sparks shooting from the top, fireflies dancing on a summer’s evening. Everything froze momentarily, other than the flames and Faith’s heart, which was sinking into the pit of her churning stomach. There were a couple of gasps from the table, the sounds distorted and muted, then everything resumed at a normal tempo and he was walking over to her, his blue eyes unusually animated.

  She stood up and he dropped down to one knee, proffering a small box which he opened to reveal a white-gold ring with a single, sparkling diamond set in the centre.

  ‘Faith,’ he said dramatically, ‘will you marry me?’

  No, she thought immediately.

  Joanna was clutching Eddie’s hand. Ken/Kev/Keith had put his arm around Sophia and Kate and Oliver were both beaming.

  The room was still, everything poised, everybody waiting for her to say yes, everybody frozen in time again. No, not frozen, warped.

  This is wrong, she thought. It’s all wrong.

  ‘We haven’t talked about this,’ she began.

  ‘Just say yes,’ Joanna urged.

  Rob was still standing uselessly in front of her and Faith reached out and took the box from him. She studied the ring intently, wondering what on earth she could say, and eventually settled for: ‘It’s beautiful. Thank you.’

  ‘Um, you’re welcome?’

  ‘Let’s talk later.’ She closed the box and handed it back to him.

  ‘Well, it’s getting late.’ Oliver scrambled to his feet and Kate stood up with him. ‘We should probably go…’

  Through another chaotic, stop-start blur, Faith bid farewell to their friends and watched them, one after another, hastily collect their things and leave. Eddie was still talking about traffic and Faith practically shoved him out of the door. ‘So glad you could make it. No, don’t worry about being late in the slightest. These things happen. Good luck with the next fitting —’ this to Joanna — ‘and we’ll see you all soon…’

  She closed the door behind them and put her head against it.

  ‘Are we going to talk about this?’ Rob demanded from behind her.

  ‘I’m just going to the loo.’

  She locked the door firmly and sat down on the floor. She blinked a couple of times, watching the black and white tiles swimming in front of her eyes. Rob loved the tiles in the bathroom, the monochrome decor had been one of his favourite things about the flat when they’d come to view it just six months earlier.

  It was their second home in a year, the first place they’d moved into together had been a little two-up, two-down on the outskirts of the commuter town in which they lived, and Rob had happily ramme
d it full to bursting with over-large IKEA furniture.

  Funhaltert. Buzzkillen.

  She’d thought if they moved somewhere a bit more central she might feel less terribly lonely. Rob had reluctantly agreed to move to the flat above one of the office buildings in the town centre. It didn’t even have a garden, the most final of final insults, but at least he had got rid of some of the offending furniture.

  But Faith still felt hopelessly stifled, hanging her head out of the bedroom window at night and wishing they hadn’t moved after all because the flat didn’t even have a balcony and she was starting to wonder what had been so wrong with the house and why she’d felt so unhappy there.

  It wasn’t the house, though. Or the flat. It wasn’t the town, it wasn’t the commute, it wasn’t even the job. Well, it was, but the only reason she was living here and commuting and trying to get promoted at work was —

  It was Rob.

  She wasn’t in love with him. She liked him, and they got along well enough, but she could already see their relationship was slowly heading into the realm of brother and sister.

  And if she wasn’t in love with him after three years, she was never going to be in love with him.

  Oh god, she thought, how am I going to tell him?

  She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. Did she look twenty-six? She didn’t feel it. She still felt about seventeen, and Rob was forever telling her she acted it. Given all that had happened back then she wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t in some kind of arrested development, frozen in time herself, forever suspended in a world that insisted it would keep on turning.

  Rob took it badly. Faith was a little surprised, because when she started to think about it the warning signs were plentiful. The fact they never really went out anymore, barring the odd ghastly dinner party with his mates. Always his, because he didn’t like the friends she grew up with or the girls with whom she used to ride track bikes. The fact they barely had sex and worse, that she didn’t actually mind. The way he was always going on at her about money, and had decided for both of them that it was time to save for a deposit without considering that she might not be so keen to put down roots here. The way he nagged her, chiding her for riding her bike on busy roads and for wandering around with her head in the clouds as if she were a naughty child. The way she reverted, inevitably, to type and found herself digging in as stubbornly as a teenager.

  ‘We’re not right for each other. You and me. Can’t you see it?’

  ‘No.’ He looked utterly pathetic and she felt a sudden stab of wild irritation with him.

  ‘We don’t like any of the same things,’ she snapped. ‘We don’t want the same things —’

  ‘I just want to be with you,’ Rob protested.

  No, you don’t, she thought. But it’s easier just to stay where we are and as you’re always telling me, ‘anything for a quiet life’. I don’t want a quiet life. I want a noisy, rowdy one. I had one, once.

  ‘I think I should go back to my parents’ house for a few days,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Just for a few days. You’re sure? Just a few days?’

  Faith was silent.

  ‘I’m tired.’ Of course he was tired, it was past ten pm. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  ‘I’ll be in in a bit,’ she said, but she knew she wouldn’t.

  Once Rob had gone to bed she reached for her phone and checked it automatically, before scrolling mindlessly through Facebook.

  Her eyes fell on a few photographs Minel had uploaded, and Faith sent her a quick text saying she would be around for a few days and did she want to meet for a drink?

  Then she texted Sara the same thing.

  Faith had met Minel and Sara when she moved to Westchester — the village Rob had scorned — as a teenager. Somehow their friendship had survived the happenings of the year before Faith turned eighteen that had seen her withdraw from everything she once held dear. Minel, otherwise engaged at teacher training college and wrapped up with her now-husband Paul, had been too distracted to notice Faith’s absence and Sara had been equally preoccupied with work. They in turn had just assumed Faith had too much on her plate with exams and leaving for university to probe too much into the reasons why they saw so little of her.

  Despite her initial fears Faith had managed to keep in touch with Minel and Sara after she moved away, and salvage something of their closeness. But she couldn’t say the same of the third of her former best friends, the one who had once been the closest of them all and the one from whom she had salvaged absolutely nothing.

  She hadn’t seen or heard from Rik since she left Westchester.

  Which was proof, Faith thought through the familiar creeping sadness that had nothing to do with the man whose proposal she had just turned down, that the first cut really is the deepest.

  Her phone bleeped. Minel had texted back.

  I can’t wait! Got something to ask you. S says she can’t wait either. Let us know when you’re here! Xx

  Faith was suddenly desperate to see her friends again, needing some of Minel’s comforting wisdom and Sara’s down-to-earth wisecracks. She already knew that Minel would be concerned and understanding and try and fix everything for her, and Sara would tell her to look on the bright side, at least she could go out on the pull again.

  Faith set off early, in her battered Land Rover that seemed to infuriate Rob so much. ‘Why don’t you just buy a Ford Fiesta?’ he demanded repeatedly but Faith couldn’t bear to part with the car, which she had worked so hard to acquire just before she left for university. It was about the only connection she had to her once-idyllic teenage years that didn’t come with a hefty wrench to the heart, and she hung onto it in the vain hope she may one day find herself in need of a car that could churn through mud and pull trailers full of gardening equipment, although she conceded that was increasingly unlikely.

  The ancient car certainly wasn’t the easiest drive on the motorway, rattling in protest if she tried to push it over 50mph. Faith turned the radio up to drown out the noise. A singer was warbling about his teenage girlfriend, wondering where she was now. She switched the radio off and scowled.

  Her parents still lived in the same house she had grown up in and it was both comforting and oppressive. Jeff and Judith had been at pains to emphasise that she was welcome home at any time and while their family dynamic had continued to fluctuate, the walls of her bedroom had stayed resolutely the same. It was still covered in the wood chipped wallpaper she had painted a cheery yellow after that final wonderful, awful summer, in need of a project to distract herself.

  Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea when Faith walked in, and she looked up and pursed her lips in a tight, disapproving version of what passed for a smile. Judith — always Judith, never Jude or Judy — Coombes was impeccably turned-out, a stark contrast to Faith who had never really shed her teenage habit of dressing for adventure, not aesthetic, and who frequently forgot to brush her black curls. Judith’s once-dark hair was now tinted a discreet ash blonde and hung in a heat-straightened, shining curtain that stopped at her well-defined jaw.

  ‘Hi Mum.’ Faith headed straight to the kettle and switched it on. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘Still asleep,’ Judith said. ‘He had a late one with his golf buddies.’ For a second a flicker of something approaching sadness drifted across her face, then just as quickly it was gone. ‘It’s lovely to finally see you.’ Faith felt a twinge of guilt at the hint of accusation in her mother’s tone. ‘Are you staying long?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Faith busied herself making tea as her mother watched silently, and then sat down at the table. She knew her mother wholeheartedly approved of Rob, considering him a stabilising influence on her somewhat wayward daughter. Being unmarried at twenty-six made nobody wayward in Faith’s book, but her mother had always thought her a complete tearaway and pushed her strongly in the direction of anything she thought might help ‘calm her down’.

&nbs
p; Rob certainly had. He’d practically sent her to sleep, draining her energy away like a squishy, aged sofa.

  ‘Why hasn’t Rob come too?’

  Faith took a sip of tea. ‘We’re taking some time apart.’ She blew on her tea meditatively. ‘Splitting up,’ she confessed. ‘We’ve split up.’

  ‘Oh Faith.’ Her mother’s face softened.

  What would it be like, Faith thought, if she could just confide in her mother the way her friends all seemed to be able to talk to theirs? If she could have rung Judith and said, ‘Mum, I feel like a forty-six year old woman trapped inside the body of somebody twenty years younger’ and if Judith could have just listened, without judging or telling her to ‘pull herself together’ or going off into a long lecture about the plight of others the world over and how Faith should be grateful for the fact she had a roof over her head and somebody with whom to share it.

  If she could have said to her, ‘I feel like I’m trudging through life robotically and nothing seems to have worked out the way I thought it would. The respectable job, the sensible boyfriend, the stability I’ve embraced have only made me feel more lost than ever before, and I increasingly don’t even recognise myself. I don’t know who I am anymore.’

  And if her mother could have said to her, ‘Well think about it Faith, when did things change?’ And she would say, ‘I know exactly when it all changed, it changed one sunny morning in September after I had come home two weeks earlier forever altered and found you sitting at this kitchen table in the exact same spot you are now and you told me —’ and that’s why I can’t talk to her, Faith thought, because it all comes back to that, and I still can’t take myself, or her, back there.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Judith said when Faith didn’t elaborate further. ‘I thought you and Rob were very well suited.’

  ‘So did he,’ Faith sighed. ‘He proposed.’ Her mother didn’t look quite surprised enough. ‘Did he come and talk to Dad?’

  ‘He did,’ Judith confirmed.

  It was the sort of old-fashioned thing Rob would do. Come and ask her father for her hand in marriage. In a way it was sweet, but Faith had always been quite adamant that she wasn’t anybody’s property, least of all her father’s. She had thought Rob must have known that.