A Spot of Bother Read Free Page B

parents’ minds about anything, ever.
    Ray wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t the most beautiful man she’d ever met. But the most beautiful man she’d ever met had shat on her from a great height. And when Ray put his arms around her she felt safer than she’d felt for a long time.
    She remembered the grim lunch at Lucy’s. The toxic goulash Barry had made. His drunken friend groping her arse in the kitchen and Lucy having that asthma attack. Looking out the window and seeing Ray with Jacob on his shoulders, playing horses, running round the lawn, jumping over the upturned wheelbarrow. And weeping at the thought of going back to her tiny flat with the dead animal smell.
    Then he turned up at her door with a bunch of carnations, which freaked her out a bit. He didn’t want to come in. But she insisted. Out of embarrassment, mostly. Not wanting to take the flowers and shut the door in his face. She made him a coffee and he said he wasn’t good at chatting and she asked if he wanted to skip straight to the sex. But it sounded funnier inside her head than out. And in truth, if he’d said, “OK,” she might have accepted just because it was flattering to be wanted, in spite of the bags under her eyes and the Cotswold Wildlife Park T-shirt with the banana stains. But he meant it, about the chatting. He was good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts and organizing expeditions to railway museums, and he preferred all of them to small talk.
    He had a temper. He’d put his hand through a door toward the end of his first marriage and severed two tendons in his wrist. But he was one of the gentlest men she knew.
    A month later he took them up to Hartlepool to visit his father and stepmother. They lived in a bungalow with a garden which Jacob thought was heaven on account of the three gnomes around the ornamental pond and the gazebo thing you could hide in.
    Alan and Barbara treated her like the squire’s daughter, which was unnerving till she realized they probably treated all strangers the same way. Alan had worked in a sweet factory for most of his life. When Ray’s mother died of cancer, he started going to the church he’d gone to as a boy and met Barbara who’d divorced her husband when he became an alcoholic (“took to drink” was the phrase she used, which made it sound like Morris Dancing or hedge laying).
    They seemed more like grandparents to Katie (though neither of her own grandfathers had tattoos). They belonged to an older world of deference and duty. They’d covered the wall of their living room with photos of Ray and Martin, the same number of each despite the unholy mess Martin had made of his life. There was a small cabinet of china figurines in the dining room and a fluffy U-shaped carpet around the base of the loo.
    Barbara cooked a stew, then grilled some fish fingers for Jacob when he complained about the “lumpy bits.” They asked what she did in London and she explained how she helped run an arts festival, and it sounded fey and crapulous. So she told the story of the drunken newsreader they’d booked the previous year, and remembered, just a little bit too late, the reason for Barbara’s divorce and didn’t even manage a graceful change of subject, just ground to an embarrassed halt. So Barbara changed the subject by asking what her parents did and Katie said Dad had recently retired from managing a small company. She was going to leave it there but Jacob said, “Grandpa makes swings,” so she had to explain that Shepherds built equipment for children’s playgrounds, which sounded better than running an arts festival, though not quite as solid as she wished.
    And maybe a couple of years ago she’d have felt uncomfortable and wanted to get back to London as fast as possible, but many of her childless London friends were beginning to seem a little fey and crapulous themselves, and it was good to spend time with people who’d brought up children of their own, and