Just for the Holidays: Your perfect summer read!. Sue Moorcroft
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saw him several times a week, sharing their love of all-things-car. She missed him. If anyone knew her deepest, darkest secrets, it was Scott.
‘Hey, you,’ he answered snippily as his image leaped to the screen, brown hair shining and spiked at the front. ‘Finally found time in your holiday schedule to remember the existence of your bestie?’
‘Don’t be grumpy. I’m feeling homesick and I wanted to hear your voice. As lovely as Alsace is, I’d rather be back in Bettsbrough enjoying the gardening leave I’d planned. Got to support Michele and family, though.’
‘Oh. OK.’ He looked mollified. ‘So what’s the place you’re staying like?’
Leah directed the phone screen towards La Petite Annexe so the camera would capture it for him. ‘This is my bolthole.’ Then she lined up on the gîte, panning around so he got the full impact of all three floors and the impressive timberwork on the outside. ‘And this is where the others are.’
‘FFS, it’s massive! Have you got a rugby team visiting or something?’
Leah laughed as she turned her phone so they could see each other again. ‘There aren’t quite enough spare rooms for that but it’s certainly not cramped.’ And she told him about the long drive over and the frost occasionally twinkling between Michele and Alister.
Leah’s spirits rose as, in return, he gave her a jokey rendition of his latest run-in with his boss, including his outrageous excuse that his work was suffering simply because ‘his bestie’ was in another country. Scott always made her feel better with his uniquely snarky affection and she sighed along with him when it was time for him to wind up the conversation with ‘Got to get back to work, I’m afraid. Get yourself home as soon as you can.’ He blew a kiss and disappeared.
Regretfully, Leah put away her phone as Natasha and Jordan burst into the garden, Jordan armed with a Rambo-sized water gun and Natasha with plastic bowls from the kitchen.
‘Girls against boys!’ Natasha yelled, frisbeeing a bowl in Leah’s direction.
With little choice but to join the fray, Leah snatched the bowl from the air and, taking outrageous advantage of Jordan’s exposed position at the pool as he filled his supersoaker, scooped up a healthy bowlful of glistening water and sloshed it down his bare back. ‘Girls against boys!’
‘Waaaaah, freezing!’ Jordan heaved harder on the plunger that loaded his weapon. ‘This means water war!’
‘Water war!’ Natasha, screaming like a chimpanzee, leaped into the middle of the paddling pool just as Alister emerged from the house. With no respect for his sombre expression she scooped a wave of water in his direction.
The arc of water hung in a shimmering rainbow in the air before sloshing over Alister’s head and chest. He flinched. Blinked. Then, resignedly, he dragged off his T-shirt, laid his bespattered spectacles away and calmly took up the garden hose. ‘OK, water war.’
‘You can’t have the hose, Alister, it’s not fair to outgun us by that much!’ Leah tried not to trip over her flip-flops as she raced to remove herself from the firing line.
‘Who said life was fair?’ Alister spun the tap to the ‘on’ position and pulled the hose trigger at the same instant as Michele stepped out from the house. The powerful jet of water met her head with an audible splat.
‘Oops.’ Alister took just a second too long to shift the jet away. ‘Sorry.’
‘Oh –!’ Michele gasped, one side of her hair plastered to her head and the corresponding eye streaming mascara.
Natasha screamed with excited laughter. ‘You got splooshed!’
With a Tarzan yell, Jordan aimed his supersoaker at his mother. ‘Girls against boys! Choose your weapon.’
For a second, Leah thought Michele would give everybody a good scolding or whirl around and retreat to her room. Time seemed to stutter while water glistened on bare skin and lush lawn.
Then Michele wiped her face and slicked back her hair. ‘Girls against boys,’ she growled dangerously, yanking the bright green hose off the tap, leaving Alister with an altogether empty weapon. Jamming her fingers into the stream of tap water she sent it spurting in his direction with deadly aim.
‘Unfair!’ he bellowed, slipping on the grass as he floundered to escape at the same time as attempting to rearm himself by stealing Jordan’s water gun.
‘Get your own weapon, soldier,’ snapped Jordan, wrestling it back and aiming at his sister.
‘Eeep! Noooooo!’ Natasha flew across the garden with the water playing square between her shoulder blades. ‘All onto Jordan, girls!’
For the next hour the air was filled with screams, protests, laughter … and a lot of water. It was sufficient to swill away the tension – temporarily at least.
Finally, puffing hard, Michele held up her hands. ‘Enough! Ceasefire or I surrender or whatever I have to do.’ She fell onto one of the now damp loungers.
Glad that the atmosphere had warmed a degree or two, Leah flopped down on another, wringing out her hair. ‘I’ll get drinks when I’ve caught my breath.’
Michele closed her eyes and tipped her pale face to the sun. ‘Thanks. I think perhaps I overdid it.’ Her clothes clinging damply didn’t deter her from plummeting almost instantly into sleep.
Alister regarded his estranged wife sheepishly. ‘Maybe she did overdo it. She’s zonked.’
‘It’s to be expected, I suppose. She’s very pale.’ Leah’s eyes darted towards the youngsters, their heads bent over their phones as they recovered from the water war via their world of constant communication. When were they to be told about their brother/sister-to-be? Would they leap on the news, hoping against hope that the baby would reunite their parents? Her heart twisted to think of yet another bitter disappointment to poison their young lives. Since the first shock of their parents splitting up, when Natasha had cried for days and Jordan had shut himself in his room, they’d coped almost unrealistically well. It was as if they’d been able to grow thin protective shells.
But if those shells were put under pressure they’d surely shatter.
Keeping these uncomfortable thoughts strictly to herself Leah managed to bask in the sun for an hour before Natasha announced herself once again to be ‘staaaaarving.’ Michele stirred but sank back into her slumbers so, stifling a sigh, Leah laid down her magazine. ‘We’ll eat out here. Lots of lovely salad.’
‘And cakes?’ Jordan suggested, hopefully.
‘With ice-cream?’ supplemented Natasha.
‘For afters,’ Leah agreed.
She wasn’t sorry to go indoors and get a break from the powerful sun. The smooth tiles of the kitchen floor felt cool beneath her feet as she put eggs on to boil, then washed watercress and lamb’s lettuce for the salade verte. Humming quietly as she moved on to slicing big firm tomatoes that were so red they glowed, she became conscious of a man’s voice speaking French outside. Then Michele, evidently restored by her nap, replying. Alister joined in. Leah didn’t bother trying to follow a conversation that was way above her command of simple French phrases. Her sister and brother were Francophiles; French Language was Alister’s teaching commitment in his junior school and Michele loved to compete in airing her command of the language.
As Leah whisked together the ingredients for a quick pecan toffee pudding, covered it with brown sugar and poured boiling water over it before sliding it into the oven, she did catch Michele insisting, ‘Oui, oui, il est notre plaisir!’ It was good that something was giving Michele pleasure because not much seemed to, these days.
There was a little rice left from the risotto and Leah made a quick rice salad, chopping in tomatoes and spring onions with almonds while the eggs cooled, pausing only to call through the back door, ‘Could someone carry the table and chairs