‘You’ll be so good when you have your own,’ Mum had remarked more than once, after Sarah had brought the Gripe Water for her. ‘You’re a natural,’ Dad had added. And she had been, hadn’t she? thought Sarah, as she rolled another pair of sensible knickers and wedged them in the corner of her case. A natural for years and years and years. She had given her all to her sister, and then to her children. Now she was going to give something back to herself.
*
It was two forty-five, on Sunday afternoon, and Sarah was sobbing at the top of the landing.
‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ she wailed. ‘I just love you both so much.’ She had one arm round Connor’s shoulders, despite his attempts to lean himself out from under it, the other circled tightly round her daughter’s neck whilst she wriggled like a beleaguered worm and muttered, ‘Get off, Mum!’
‘Pull yourself together, Mother!’ chided Connor sternly, finally managing to prise Sarah off him. ‘It’s only two months.’
‘It’s really not a big deal, Mum,’ said Olivia, rolling her eyes and pulling a sheaf of golden hair out of Sarah’s grasp. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘If you don’t stop this, you’re going to miss your bus,’ added Connor. ‘You’ve been hanging off us for twenty minutes. Please don’t do this when we get to the station.’
‘No. I won’t, I promise,’ said Sarah, attempting to pull herself together. ‘I’m OK now.’ She sniffed and snuffled her nose into a screwed-up tissue. ‘Let’s go. Be good for Auntie Meg,’ she said, giving Olivia a final hug and briefly wondering if Meg would be remotely good for them. ‘And come up and visit me. We can go to Madame Tussauds.’
‘Maybe.’ Olivia shrugged. ‘Bye, Mum,’ and the two of them practically herded their mother down the stairs and out of the door.
Connor threw her suitcase in the boot and Sarah climbed into her battered old blue Fiesta. It had certainly seen better days. It had scratches, a dented back bumper and one of the doors didn’t quite shut properly – capable of short journeys only, if that. Sarah never spent any money on it; everything she earned went on Connor and Olivia, mostly to keep them supplied with junk food and chocolate. Before she’d shut the front door, she’d left some money for them on top of the fridge along with strict instructions to ration it and to maybe actually buy some vegetables once in a while. She wouldn’t be sending any extra home unless it was an emergency.
The village flashed slowly by as the Fiesta couldn’t manage much more than 40 mph. Connor put the CD player on and sang tunelessly along to Foreigner. She looked across at him, her boy at the wheel. He had the hint of a whiskery moustache and a five o’clock shadow; his once cute features somehow metamorphosed into those of this incredible Boy-Man. She wanted to well up, but she had promised him she wouldn’t, so she forced the tears back down.
‘This is you,’ said Connor, as they pulled up outside the station. A coach was waiting, its engine running. This was it, she thought: she was really going. She was abandoning her children and going up to London to re-seek her fortune after all these years. She should really be taking a Dick Whittington-style knapsack.
‘If Dad makes one of his rare phone calls, tell him where I am,’ said Sarah, as she got out of the car. Connor got her case out of the boot for her and one of the coach drivers lifted it with a gruff ‘Ipswich bound?’ and threw it in the baggage compartment at the bottom of the coach.
‘Doubtful,’ said Connor. ‘And isn’t he in France or somewhere at the moment, sketching muddy bits of water and getting pissed?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Sarah, trying to give her son another quick hug and kiss without crying. ‘Just tell him if he gets in touch.’ It was a few steps on from ‘Tell your father to pass the salt,’ this message relay between her, the twins and their father, but it worked for her. Only speaking to Harry through the children these days was a great relief.
‘Will do, bye, Mum,’ Connor said, and she was waving at him as she walked away, and she was blowing him kisses he pretended weren’t for him, and she was getting on the coach.
Sarah sat at the front, behind the driver – she felt like she wanted to fully see the road ahead – and watched from the window as Connor folded his long, lanky legs into the Fiesta and drove off. More people slowly trickled onto the coach. Chatting, laughing, and squashing bags between their knees; juggling packets of sweets and drinks bottles; adjusting the air conditioning above their heads. A mother and daughter were bickering about a flask of orange squash and who would sit in the aisle. A burly man with a Stephen King novel wedged himself next to Sarah with a grunted ‘Afternoon.’
‘Hello,’ she said, praying that Pet Sematary was suitably horrifying he wouldn’t talk to her on the journey.
Finally, the rumbling standby engine roared into action, the driver released the handbrake and he turned the enormous steering wheel away from the kerb.
‘OK, madam?’ he asked, over his shoulder.
‘Yes, I’m OK, thank you,’ she replied. She was better than OK.
She was ready.
Meg
When Meg finally arrived at Tipperton Mallet station, on that bloody coach, she realized everything looked exactly the same as it had twenty years ago when she’d got on the 9.42 and had escaped up to London. If she was expecting things to have moved on in any way, she was mistaken. There was the same little café, the one that served the dodgy doughnuts and the revolting coffee; there was the vending machine, which never worked unless you gave it a swift kick to the bottom right-hand corner; there was the heavy, dispiriting feeling that a big fat nothing was going on.
‘Tipperton Mallet!’ said the driver all proudly, as he parked the coach, as though he were responsible for the village’s existence. He’d been eyeing Meg up in his rear-view mirror since Ipswich station, the pervy old git. She’d had to sit right at the front as she was late getting on, and she’d clocked him looking at her bum as she’d squeezed her messenger bag onto the overhead rack. She wasn’t really dressed for the country, she knew, in her high-necked black minidress and gladiator sandals, but she didn’t own any jodhpurs or fleeces. She hoped Sarah had some she could borrow; if she had to do the whole country thing, she may as well look the part.
Meg got off the coach. She stood outside the station entrance, watching as her fellow passengers walked off with holdalls and rucksacks or were picked up in filthy cars or, in one unfathomable instance, a horse and cart. She was here now, and she’d better try to rustle up some of the right feeling for the place. She tried to put positive images in her mind: gambolling ponies, the smell of freshly mown grass, country pubs, open fires, a kind of Jilly Cooper-esque existence – romping with polo players on haystacks and sleeping off sloe gin in cart lodges … But no, she couldn’t do it. Tipperton Mallet meant boredom and sadness and oppression. She didn’t want to be here, and she missed London already.
It was a gorgeously warm afternoon. She perched on the edge of a bottle-green station windowsill, stretched out her legs and closed her eyes. She’d walk to Orchard Cottage in a bit. She was in no great hurry to get there, although she’d certainly been in a massive hurry to leave the place, all those years ago.
Meg opened her eyes again, on hearing a faint shout and a clicking noise. There was a field, opposite the train station, and a man was walking a horse across it. Well-honed calves, silky brown hair and an attractive gait, and that was just the horse. Well, she thought, there was her first hunky farmer.