Page 16 of Just for the Season

‘Army.’ She lifts her head from the fridge and says, ‘I would love to have a utility like this one day. It’s amazing. Although there’s no actual point in someone who’s going to be alone forever having a big utility. Maybe the space would be better utilised as a study. Wow, utility, utilised. Do you think those two words come from the same stem? Wow. I never thought of that before. I really should have done because I’m an estate agent. Well. I was an estate agent.’

I shake my head and return to our actual conversation. ‘I think maybe you should go home now, and I’ll go back in there and tell everyone that this was all a drunken joke.’

‘Noooooo,’ she says. ‘No, no, no. I can’t do that. And nor can you. Noooooo.’

‘I mean, yes, yes, yes, you can?’

‘Nope. Really. No. I can’t.’

I open my mouth to say yes again, before deciding that we’re going nowhere fast.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell everyone on your behalf. Remember, my children heard what you said. I need to tell them right now that it wasn’t true.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Weirdly, she’s talking to me as though I’m the one short on common sense, slightly shaking her head at me. ‘You’re leaving soon. Are you going to be posted abroad? Maybe we’ll pretend to see each other for a bit and then it can fizzle out and hopefully by then I’ll have found a sperm donor and a job and a house and Gran won’t worry about me any more and everything will be fine.’

‘What?’

‘When. Are. You. Leaving?’ she asks.

I ignore her arsy tone and change tack, deciding to humour her briefly. I say, ‘I can leave when I like because the children are staying for sleepovers.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ She sounds like she genuinely believes she has good reason to be annoyed with me, which is mind-blowing. ‘When are you leaving Milbury? With the army?’

‘Army? What?’

‘Are you or are you not an army officer?’

‘Not.’ What? Seriously, what?

‘You aren’t in the army?’ She stares hard at me and then wags a finger sternly in my face. ‘Why, then, did I think that you were?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘Oh. So are you not leaving Milbury soon?’

I shake my head. Definitely not. I like it here, and the kids like it here and are very settled. And for that reason alone I do not want to behave oddly in front of all my neighbours and pretend to be this madwoman’s partner.

‘That’s unfortunate,’ Frankie says. She’s seeming a little more sober. She frowns suddenly. ‘Do you think I imagined that you were in the army?’

‘Probably.’ I don’t care. I just want her to agree to get back out there and confirm that she was just making a stupid joke before, and then we can never, ever speak to each other again.

‘Hmm. Okay. Fine. Well, we’ll have to fizzle out in due course some other way. But in the short term we can’t.’

‘Er, I think you’ll find we can,’ I tell her. ‘Very easily. Literally, just tell people it was a drunken joke. Right now.’

‘No. Certainly not. You don’t understand. Gran’s nearly eighty-five and she’s been really ill, and I don’t think she has long left and she really worries about me, and until last week I did have a fiancé and a very good job and a very nice flat, and now I have nothing because the fiancé dumped me and he was my boss and I was living in his flat and my own flat’s rented out and the rent isn’t much after tax so I can’t afford to move anywhere else, so right now I have nothing except lovely, lovely, wonderful Ellie and Gran, and obviously friends, but you can’t live with friends for long, especially once they start having kids, like mine have. So anyway, basically my life completely fell apart last week and I don’t want Gran to know that and so it’s perfect that she thinks I’m dating you.’ She pauses her incredible word-vomit and then says, ‘You might be grumpy and patronising but you are at least very handsome, which is ideal.’

‘Er, thanks?’

‘Not a problem.’ She smiles graciously at me and I shake my head.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Although I’m very sorry about your break-up and all the things that came with it.’ Losing her fiancé, job and home in one fell swoop would explain why she over-reacted about the cake and then got so drunk. I’m feeling a little guilty now that I’ve been so annoyed with her.

‘Sorry but you cannot upset my wonderful, amazing grandmother,’ she says. ‘You can’t. She brought me up. She’s everything. And she’s very elderly and has had a lot of health problems and frankly it’s a miracle that she’s on her feet here this evening. You can’t upset a wonderful elderly lady. Pleeeeeease.’

Her eyes are glistening with tears, and I shift uncomfortably on my feet.

And then tears begin to dribble slowly down her cheeks.