‘Well, the woman in the shop said she thought it was cheese and onion. But since it appears to be brown and sludgy, I can only assume it’s meat. Are you vegetarian?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m all about sustainability. Eating food that’s in season. Having organic and ethically treated animals. Eating fish that are plentiful and not caught in bloody great drift nets that denude the sea.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Yes, I know, I’m on the well-ridden hobby-horse again. I’ll just dismount over here and take the spurs off.’
Miranda felt now as though she should be apologising for devouring a pie made of indeterminate animal, which had probably been treated very badly and didn’t even taste nice. But bugger it. It had filled the hole in her stomach and it was dead anyway.
Will gestured to the blue sky. ‘I love this country. Pissing down with rain this morning and now it’s like the Caribbean.’
‘Which is like the Caribbean, really,’ said Miranda. ‘Pissing down one minute and baking hot the next? Or, at least, it is at some times of the year …’ She tailed off.
‘A favourite holiday destination?’ asked Teresa, her mutton hair seeming to express rank disapproval.
‘We have friends in Antigua. Very good friends.’
‘Naturally,’ said Teresa.
She really doesn’t like me, thought Miranda. And then, because she could have gone either way, she decided to antagonise her. ‘Um. I also have friends in Switzerland, who I visit on a regular basis. Oh, and friends who have an ocean-going yacht – I join them when I can.’ She noticed Alex shooting a glance at her and stopped. Then added, ‘When I’m not camping in, er, Lancashire.’
Alex flashed her a massive smile. Clearly he didn’t believe her for a minute.
Lunch packed away, they walked back to the towpath. She was gratified to see him manoeuvre a spot beside her.
‘Lancashire, eh?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘A huge favourite.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Chilterns,’ she threw back.
‘My goodness! I can only assume they must have got up on their tiptoes and shuffled north, then.’
She chuckled. ‘Never was much good at geography. Where are the Chilterns then?’
‘Not far from here – the area near Henley to the south-east. You’d be in the Yorkshire Dales if you wanted hilly near Lancashire. Beautiful part of the country. And you don’t have to camp to enjoy it.’
‘Is that where you’re from?’ she enquired.
‘No,’ he responded. There was a beat before he continued, ‘I’m from loads of places. We moved around a lot when I was growing up and I’ve continued the trend.’
‘Where do your parents live now?’ she asked.
‘They’re divorced. My mum lives on the Isle of Wight. My dad …’ he hesitated ‘… my dad … Last time I spoke to him he was in Spain somewhere. And it was raining.’ His voice held a note of finality, as though that was all he would be saying on the subject. ‘Are you from London?’
‘Yup. Grew up in Camden Town, before it got quite as skanky as it is now. It’s all about ripped tights, piercings and …’ she’d been about to say ‘dreadlocks’ ‘… it’s a bit druggy. You see people coming towards you smacking their gums and looking wild and …’
‘You realise it’s your father checking up on you,’ he finished promptly.
‘Exactly.’ She laughed. ‘Then we moved to Primrose Hill and I spent all my time kissing boys in the park.’ Now, why had she said that? Freud would have had a field day. It was absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, because she had been looking at his lips as he spoke. She went through the routine in her head: I am a forty-three-year-old mother of two. Leave this poor child alone and stop being predatory. Yuk. What was it they called women like her, these days? ‘Cougar,’ she exclaimed aloud.
‘Where?’ asked Alex, pretending to look about in consternation. ‘That would be a very unusual sighting.’
She bit her bottom lip. ‘I was trying to remember something,’ she said. And left it there, since there was nothing else she could say that wouldn’t land her in it.
She realised with a jolt that it had been ages since she’d had such a nice time. Flirting was very therapeutic, even if it did feel wrong with a boy who was barely out of short trousers.
She donned her gloves again and got stuck into the path clearing, finding it satisfying in a way that she had never found cleaning the house. Maybe it was because everyone was working together. If cleaning the house had been a team event instead of a lonely chore, which was only noticed when it hadn’t been done … In fact, after careful consideration – she stretched, hands on her waist, leaning backwards and admiring the blue of the sky – she would have to say that the best time she had had recently was the evening of celebratory divorce drinks with Hannah. They had laughed so much she had almost thrown up a kidney. She had also cried quite a lot. But somehow she had still had a good time. That was a bloody sad indictment of the last few years of her life. She bent down and picked up a load of prickly brambles, which had been thoughtfully cut into manageable pieces. She had taken off her jacket as the day had warmed up, but she was beginning to feel like a cheese wrapped in plastic. The wicking shirt, which was supposed to allow her skin to breathe, was sticking to her back. If her skin was breathing, she imagined it would have its mouth wide open, gasping for air. A drop of sweat fell off her nose.
Right. That was it. She took off her shirt, revealing a decidedly skimpy vest top and a wretchedly ugly sports bra. It couldn’t be helped. It was either that or suffocation. She did an impression of a cormorant drying its wings, then carried on picking up rubbish with renewed vigour.
An hour later, Will called another break and handed out bottles of water. Miranda drank hers thankfully.
‘Hot work, eh?’ Alex tried unsuccessfully not to look down her top.
‘Any hotter and I’ll be down to my pants,’ she said unthinkingly. And blushed. She could feel the heat staining her chest. Even her ears felt hot.
‘Come on, sun,’ he said quietly.
Which didn’t make her feel any cooler.
Driving home, with scratches up her arms and smelling like a navvy, as her mother would have said, she had to confess to feeling satisfied and rather virtuous. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends about it. Her real friends – those who weren’t tainted with a whiff of Nigel, so not Lydia or Estelle or anybody who had set her up with shit dates.
When she unlocked the front door, she wanted to embrace her house. There was nothing quite like a shower after an honest day’s work. It seemed so long ago that she had been standing in this cubicle, trying to activate herself. Naked and still damp, she weighed herself. How depressing, she thought. All that exercise and I’m still fat.
Miranda was not fat. In previous centuries she would have been described variously as ‘voluptuous’, ‘Rubenesque’ or ‘hourglass’. But it was hard to find clothes that fitted – they all appeared to have been designed for flat-bottomed and -chested girls. Or boys, even.
The one decent piece of advice she’d had from her mother was to buy proper bras. Rigby & Peller made excellent, comfortable upholstery for her top half, and after a fitting (‘Madam has a fuller left breast’), she liked to nip into Harrods for tea and to use the luxury washrooms.
She checked her breasts for lumps and idly wondered if she could ever have worked in a strip joint, showing her wares, as it were. In her teens she’d been addicted to a magazine that was almost entirely about girls and women prostituting themselves because of their circumstances.