The Switch(98)

‘What’s the matter with me?’ His breath is misting the glass. ‘I’m not the one who just hacked down a perfectly serviceable hedge in the middle of the night!’

‘Do you really want to know why I did it, Arnold?’

‘Yes. I really do.’

I chuck the wet cloth down. ‘I thought it would be funny.’

He narrows his eyes. ‘Funny?’

‘Yes. You and me, we’ve spent decades fighting over who owns what, whose trees are shading whose flowerbeds, who’s responsible for pruning which bush. You’ve got grumpier and grumpier and I’ve got snarkier and snarkier. And do you know what we’ve really been talking about all that time, Arnold? We’ve been talking about what happened the very first time we met.’

Arnold opens and closes his mouth.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. I know you haven’t.’

His mouth closes, a firm line. ‘I’ve not forgotten.’

Arnold was married to Regina, Jackson’s mother. A strange woman, blocky-shouldered like she was most at home in the eighties, her hair tightly curled and her fists usually clenched. And I was married to Wade.

‘Nothing happened,’ Arnold reminds me.

My hands are spread, leaning on the worktop on either side of the sink. Arnold is framed in a pane of glass, cut off at the shoulder like a portrait.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s what I’ve always told myself, too. No point dwelling on it. Certainly no use talking about it. Since nothing happened.’

‘Quite right,’ Arnold says.

‘Only it almost did, didn’t it, Arnold?’ My heart is beating a little too fast.

Arnold reaches up to adjust his cap, his hands weathered and callused, his glasses still slightly askew. Say something, I think. Say it. Because I am like a teenage boy – I’m painfully self-conscious now, terrified he’ll tell me I was reading something that wasn’t there.

‘It almost did,’ he says eventually.

I close my eyes and breathe out.

We’d been in this kitchen, not far from where I’m standing. He’d brought around an apple pie Regina had made, with custard in a little milk jug; we’d talked for so long in the hallway my arms had started to ache from holding the plate. He’d been so charming, such a thoughtful, engaging man.

Wade and I had just bought Clearwater Cottage. The house was barely furnished, half falling to pieces. Arnold and I had walked through into the kitchen – I remember laughing very hard, feeling ever so giddy – and I’d opened the new fridge to pop the custard in there, and when I’d closed it again he’d been very close, just a few steps from where I am now. We’d stayed like that. My heart had raced then, too. I’d not felt giddy in so long I’d thought it was gone from my repertoire for good, like touching my toes.

Nothing happened.

But it almost did. And it was enough to make me want to keep Arnold as far away from this house as possible. Because I had made a vow. It meant nothing to Wade, it seems, but it had meant something to me.

‘We got into the habit, didn’t we,’ Arnold says, as I open my eyes again. He’s smiling slightly. ‘We got so bloody good at hating one another.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Arnold,’ I say, ‘would you like to come in?’

*

In the end, it’s not a stolen kiss between new neighbours. It’s a slow, lingering one between very old friends, who, as it happens, have only just realised that’s what they’ve been all along.

It’s an extraordinary feeling, wrapping my arms around Arnold’s shoulders, pressing my cheek to the warm skin of his neck. Breathing in the cut-grass and soap smell of his hair and his collar. It is strange and wonderful. Familiar and new.

Afterwards, when my lips are left tingling, we sit together side by side on the sofa and stare out at the hedge, or what remains of it. Arnold is smiling. He seems energised, almost jolted into life – he holds his spine very straight and the hand that isn’t in mine is flicking and fidgeting in his lap.

‘Bloody hell,’ he says, ‘just think what Betsy and the rest of them will say.’ He turns to me and grins, a cheeky, fiendish grin that makes him look like a little boy.

‘You won’t say a word,’ I tell him sternly, raising a warning finger. ‘Not a word, Arnold.’

He grabs the finger so fast I yelp.

‘That tone of voice won’t work on me any more,’ he says, bringing my hand to his lips for a kiss that doesn’t dislodge his grin for a moment. ‘Now I know what you’re really saying when you tell me off.’

‘Not all the time,’ I protest. ‘Sometimes you really need telling. Like with the rabbit.’

‘For the last time!’ Arnold laughs. ‘I did not poison your bloody rabbit.’

‘Then how did it die?’ I ask, flummoxed.

‘Eileen, it was seven years ago. I imagine it’s too late for an inquest.’

‘Damn. I hate an unsolved mystery.’

‘You really thought I did it?’

‘It didn’t occur to me that it could have happened any other way, quite honestly.’

He frowns. ‘You think that little of me?’

I smooth my thumb across the back of his hand, tracing lines between the marks age has left on his skin.