Chapter Seven

      Della couldn’t sleep. This had been happening a lot lately: dozing briefly, then waking up simmering hot, her chest slick with sweat, hence sleeping naked these days. This time, though, it was clear to her that it wasn’t just due to her internal thermostat going haywire, but the thing, still swirling around in her mind at 2.17 a.m.: Mark’s whole day and evening at a golf course that was damn well closed.

      She turned in bed and glanced at the back of his head as he slept. In all the years they’d been together, he had barely had a broken night’s sleep. She envied this, resented it, even: the way men’s bodies just carried on doing their thing so efficiently without so much as a single hot flush. It wasn’t that she wished a temperature, or even mild discomfort, on him. It just seemed unfair that, after pregnancy and childbirth along came facial sproutings, a thickening waist and irrational mood swings (‘I am not being irrational!’ she told herself, silently). Not his fault, of course. He’d got lucky when it came to ageing, too. ‘Are you planning to age any time soon?’ Nicola Crowther had asked Roxanne during their mother’s funeral tea. She might as well have asked Mark the same question.

      Some men became rather pouchy as the years rolled by: a cosy, unthreatening look which, as an enthusiastic eater herself, Della certainly had no problem with. But that hadn’t happened to Mark. While he no longer had the long, lithe frame of the young man she had fallen in love with, he was in extremely good shape, nicely toned with the kind of body that still looked good in the Levis he favoured when gardening or lounging around the house.

      The thing is, she decided now, staring up at the ceiling rose in the shadowy room, he exercised. Every Saturday, after bringing her coffee, he was off. The question was, what sort of exercise was he participating in exactly? Oh, what a ridiculous thought. The course was closed and now Della’s imagination was running riot. That was the trouble with lying awake in the small hours: there was a tendency to churn things over and over, to let minor concerns blow up out of all proportion.

      She was careful not to wake Mark as she slipped quietly out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and padded downstairs. In the hallway now, she clicked on the light and crouched down to examine the cookbooks. She plucked out Microwave Cakes, remembering begging her mother to let her make one, and what a joyless thing it was too: a turd in a cup. ‘Told you so,’ Kitty had said with a shake of her head (right up until the end, she had regarded her microwave with deep suspicion, still labelling it ‘newfangled’).

      Della scanned the numerous piles and wondered if perhaps she should try to whittle down the collection just a little. There were fat, meaty tomes devoted entirely to roasts and offal, which she was confident she would never use. Della opened The Boiled Beef Bible, certain that she caught a whiff of testosterone as she flicked through the pages. She picked up an outsized book entitled Entertaining With Flair. Della remembered her parents’ dinner parties, before her father upped and offed with Jane Ribble from the insurance company where he worked: the house filled with tipsy laughter, and cigarette smoke filtering up to her little bedroom in the eaves. She missed those parties, even though she had never actually been invited to them – or perhaps it was her calm, quiet father she had really yearned for. Contact with him was sporadic after the split. Della got the impression that he was too wrapped up with Jane to pay much attention to the family he’d left, and although he always remembered his children’s birthdays, soon a fiver began to replace presents, until eventually it would just be a card.

      Della flicked through slim specialist books on olives, lemons – even salt. There were lavishly photographed volumes devoted to cooking with butter and cream: saturated fat virtually oozed from the pages. She could sense her arteries furring just by looking at the pictures. No one seemed to shun dairy or gluten in those days. The only intolerances Della could remember her mother having was when she or Roxanne took a biscuit without asking. Jeff was allowed to help himself to whatever he wanted.

      Now, at nearly 3 a.m., Della sat cross-legged on the polished floorboards of the hall, reading about tender stews for the elderly and infirm, and being transported back to a world of chopping and stirring in her mother’s kitchen, a place that always felt comforting and right. She pored over elaborate picnic menus and remembered the Burley Bridge kids all congregating by the river where they built a fire and cooked sausages. She studied cocktail recipes – almost able to taste a stolen sip of her mother’s G&T – and sensed herself hurtling rapidly towards type-2 diabetes whilst immersed in Sugarcraft Delights. From its pages fell a small sheet of thin blue paper, folded over several times. Della opened it carefully and studied it. Typed on a manual typewriter, it read:

      Della