business took off and they were able to afford pastures greener. I sit down beside my one-time neighbour and sometime employer and prop my face in my hands.
‘Never mind him, though. What interesting work have you got lined up for me today?’
Sol pulls a face, then straightens it immediately. ‘Wrinkles,’ he tells me, ‘I must remember not to do that. Anyway, I’ve got a pile of typing for you, darling. I think most of it is legible. Let me know what you think of the hero.’ He sits back, his white linen shirt half-open, showing off his all-year tan to good effect. He is gorgeous, actually—the thought pops irrelevantly into my head. No wonder Adam was heartbroken when they split up. Annie-Jo has a point. Why do I never notice men at all these days—even the gay ones?
‘The hero? Oh, it’s your novel then? Not the new brochure for the shop?’
‘Justin’s doing the brochure.’ Sol waves a hand airily. ‘He understands the new publishing program better than anyone. He’s a whiz-kid. He’s young. They’re all whiz-kids.’ He looks a bit tragic as he says this.
‘Adam had a pretty good handle on that side of things…’
‘Adam was a dinosaur, Rachel. Old-fashioned in the extreme. In all his ways.’ He gives me a significant look. ‘Life’s an adventure to be tasted, isn’t it, sweetie?’
‘So, the whiz-kid is helping you with the brochure?’
‘Actually, he’s being such a bitch about it I told him he could bloody well do it himself.’ His voice is blasé, but the pain in his eyes when he mentions Justin is etched deep.
‘Justin playing up again?’ Uh-oh, trouble at the ranch. I’m still holding the phone to my ear, but there’s no sign of Bill coming back just yet. Bill works for a law firm and no doubt he’s used to keeping people on hold for great lengths of time, I think. I will hold for exactly two minutes more.
‘If I didn’t love him so much I would dump him, truly I would. But we’re soul mates,’ Sol tells me, ‘we were destined to be. He’s making me suffer to show me what I put him through in our previous existence together.’
‘Won’t that mean he’ll have to come back and suffer the same thing again himself?’ I swap the phone over to my other ear, and hand Sol the corkscrew and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.
‘I don’t know. Good point. I shall put that to him. He won’t care, though, that’s the thing. He’s a Gemini, isn’t he? I was warned. Aquarius rising, too; he won’t be tied down.’ He pours out a small amount of wine and swivels it around in the glass, savouring its bouquet.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. He never used to look this sad. Or even so careworn as he does at the moment. Well, stands to reason really. I know Adam was the one who used to take care of the troublesome things in life, like shop brochures and acquisitions and keeping the website updated. Making sure there was milk in the fridge. In short, all the boring little necessities of life, which allowed everyone else—aka Solly—to go out and be ‘carefree’.
‘Will he let Shelley go with you?’ Sol indicates the phone with his head. ‘He should let her do what she wants to, poor darling.’ He pours out a large glass and hands it to me.
‘I’ve made up my mind I’m going to take her anyway,’ I tell him slowly. ‘I might need to ask for your help with some things, though. Hattie, for example, will you look after her for us?’
‘The tortoise?’ Sol grins amicably. ‘Sure.’
‘Will you be around the last week in May, though? This is really important, Solly. Are you sure you can do it?’
‘Sure thing, honey bunch.’ He is still thinking about Justin, I can tell.
‘Hello, Rachel?’ Bill is back on the phone.
‘Hello. All sorted then?’
There is a pause.
‘No.’ Bill is sounding surprisingly determined. You’d think he’d got enough on his plate with the demon child he and Stella have produced, but no. ‘This might be what Shelley’s asked you for, Rachel, but there are other people’s feelings to be considered here too. She’s used to getting too much of her own way, I think. That’s the trouble with it. When she comes over to us we stick to a much stricter regime and she has to deal with it. She has to eat whatever Stella puts on her plate for one thing.’
‘Meaning?’ What the hell has that got to do with anything? The two of them have obviously had a very long conversation while I’ve been hanging on that damned phone. I can feel my ire rising. Why do I always let him do this to me? I swore that I wouldn’t, not today.
‘She’s as thin as a stick, Rach. She can’t eat more than a morsel of food on an ordinary day, be honest now. We weighed her when she came to us for that week over Christmas, at the beginning, and then again at the end.’ I can hear him sounding a little bit sheepish as he realises what he is admitting to but he ploughs on with it anyway. ‘And she’d put on five pounds at the end.’ Sheepish, but triumphant nonetheless.
‘Now you’re telling me that I don’t feed her?’
‘Stella said when she handed her the bath towel she could see her ribs sticking out. You’ve got to be aware of this, surely? I have to say it, even if it hurts you to hear it.’
‘If you think you could do a better job then we could talk about options here. I’m worn out myself, with being her carer. I love her, but I’m worn out. Maybe you’re right. You two might be able to do a much better job than I can manage these days.’ My voice is surprisingly calm. A year before I might have made that as a throw-away comment in temper, knowing full well he would never agree to take me up on it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to, anyway. But this time I really mean it.
Sol’s face is a picture. I cover the phone with my hands while Bill relays what I’ve just said to his wife. ‘He won’t take me up on it, of course. There is no way they could hack it. They are both stressed up to the eyeballs with their own child as it is. And,’ I turn my face away from the phone to make doubly sure they won’t overhear, ‘to tell you the truth I think there is nothing wrong with little Nikolai, not at all. It’s just that some two-year-olds don’t want to learn the violin and take French language lessons and gymnastics classes every week. They get tantrummy about it. It is all very well to keep up a military regime for one or two days every couple of weeks but it’s not so easy when the child is resisting you all the way, on a day in, day out basis. Shelley won’t eat much because the tablets she has to take with her food sit like a pile of gravel in her belly and they ruin her appetite. She copes at her dad’s because she just doesn’t take the tablets for those days, just so as not to make a fuss.’
Sol nods sympathetically.
I know she’s too thin. I’d like her to be a lot heavier. I’d like a lot of things that just aren’t going to happen.
‘Let’s not argue over this.’ Bill is back and has gone into reasonable mode. ‘You know that suggestion isn’t practicable.’
‘I thought not.’
‘But to get back to my previous point, there are certain procedures you could put in place…’
‘Save it.’ I am the one feeling tetchy now. ‘Save your parenting theories for the one you have to deal with, will you? And let’s keep our conversation to the birthday plans. That’s what I rang about, and I too have a schedule to keep to this afternoon.’
I have to ring the surgery after speaking to Bill and ask why they’d only given me one month’s supply of Shelley’s tablets again. They used to give me six months, then it went down to three months, and then it became a ridiculous one month’s supply! I can’t spend my life going up and down putting in repeat prescriptions every four weeks. Everything takes up so much time. Bill doesn’t have to deal with any of that, and so he can’t possibly know what it is like.