Not That Kind of Girl Read online

  Catherine Alliott

  * * *

  NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Not That Kind of Girl

  ‘Her books are supremely readable, witty and moving in equal measure and she has a brilliantly sharp ear for dialogue’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Possibly my favourite writer’ Marian Keyes

  ‘An addictive cocktail of wit, frivolity and madcap romance’

  Time Out

  ‘Sensitive, funny and wonderfully well written’

  Wendy Holden, Daily Express

  ‘Another charming tale of heartbreak from this wonderfully warm and witty author’ Woman

  ‘A poignant but charming journey of self-discovery.

  A bittersweet and captivating novel’ Closer

  ‘We defy you not to get caught up in Alliott’s life-changing tale’ Heat

  ‘A fun, fast-paced page-turner’ OK!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catherine Alliott is the author of twelve bestselling novels including One Day in May, The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton and A Crowded Marriage. She lives with her family in Hertfordshire.

  For my godchildren –

  James, Isobel, Eleanor, Catherine,

  Sam, William and Hugo.

  Chapter One

  ‘What’s up, Mum?’

  Angus put his head round the playroom door and saw my face. I hastily wiped my damp eyes on my towelling dressing-gown and pulled it firmly around me as I perched on the sofa.

  ‘Oh, nothing, darling.’ I sniffed hard, turning away from him.

  ‘What?’ He came in. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Well, it’s just …’ I licked my lips. ‘Tamsin’s been caught shoplifting again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes, and you know she’s pregnant?’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Oh God yes – didn’t you know?’ I swung back to him, wide-eyed.‘Yes! She’s having Jeff ’s baby. And when the police came to question her I thought Jeff was going to be livid, but he wasn’t, he was sweet. Completely sweet. Put his arm round her and everything, said he’d stand by her at the trial and – ooh, I don’t know.’ I pulled a tissue from my pocket. Blew hard. ‘That set me off, I think.’

  Angus regarded me in the doorway. ‘You’re sad.’

  ‘No, I’m not, darling. I’m fine.’ I got briskly to my feet and found my slippers.

  ‘No, as in pathetic. You don’t get out enough, Mum.’

  ‘Angus, it was a particularly moving scene, all right?’

  I snapped, moving quickly to the television to turn it off. ‘If you had an ounce of artistic sentiment in your soul you’d appreciate that kitchen-sink drama can be incredibly moving. Ask Harold Pinter.’

  ‘What – Home and Away?’ He snorted. ‘Give me a break. Is this what you do when we’re at school then? Loll around watching soaps?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I bridled. ‘I only came in to turn it off since you’d been “lolling” in front of it all morning!’

  ‘Well, anyway, Penny’s here. I just saw her car coming down the lane. She’s probably parking in the drive right now.’

  I stared at him in horror. ‘Already?’ I squeaked. I pushed past him and ran through to the kitchen, clutching my blue bathrobe to my chest as it fanned out behind me. ‘She wasn’t supposed to be coming until lunchtime!’

  I stared out of the window in disbelief as, sure enough, Penny’s shiny blue Range Rover, without a speck of London dirt, performed an immaculate three-point turn in the gravel sweep outside. It reversed under the kitchen window and parked neatly by the back door, right next to my tubs, which at this time of year should have been a riot of autumn colour, but instead, with their blank, staring earth eyes, looked more like a couple of Damien Hirst exhibits.

  ‘It is practically lunchtime, Mum. It’s ten past twelve.’

  ‘Is it? God!’ I glanced at the clock aghast. ‘Where’s the morning gone?’

  ‘In your case, down the cathode-ray tubes – and by the way, Dad rang to ask if you’d picked up the chicken wire he ordered from the farmshop.’

  ‘No, I haven’t picked up his sodding chickenwire! When does he imagine I’ve got time to do that, in between feeding his goats and clipping his bantams’ toenails? Now quick, out of my way. I must get dressed before Penny sees me.’

  I scurried away from the window and made a dash for the back stairs, but in my haste tripped over Angus’s cricket bat, cunningly propped up against the kitchen table. Staggering to stay upright I barked my shin on the table leg, swore violently and shut my eyes tight, seeing stars. When I opened them again, it was to see Penny breezing in through my back door, blonde bob shining in the low October sun, lipstick gleaming, her arms laden with flowers. She stopped in her tracks and beamed delightedly at Angus.

  ‘Good heavens. My favourite godson! What the devil are you doing here? Didn’t expect to see you at a midweek girly luncheon. You haven’t been expelled, have you, you little toad?’

  He grinned as she ruffled his flicked-up fringe.

  ‘Oops, sorry.’ She hastily poked it back into place. ‘Probably spent all morning petrifying that, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have actually, and no I haven’t been expelled, although it was touch and go last week. Only kidding,’ he added hastily, seeing my face darken. ‘No, I’ve got an exeat.’

  ‘An exeat! God, the more you pay, the more you get the little blighters home, don’t you? Oh, and incidentally, I owe you a birthday present, and since I never know what to get you …’ She dived into her bag and pulled out a twenty-pound note. Stuffed it into his hand. ‘Quits?’

  ‘Cool. Thanks, Penny.’

  He turned on his heel and made for the back stairs, keen to squirrel it away no doubt, before his mother could get her thieving hands on it and use it to pay the daily. Rather pathetically, I made to follow him.

  ‘Just going to change, Pen,’ I warbled gaily. ‘Won’t be a mo!’

  But Penny hadn’t been her school hurdling champion for nothing, and in a trice she’d crossed the room, negotiated the cricket bat, and seized my arm.

  ‘What the hell have you come as? Mrs Shagpile?’

  I turned, cowering in the beam of my oldest friend’s critical gaze, caught in her vicelike grip. She was looking as glamorous as ever in pale blue Agnès B cashmere and black bootleg trousers.

  ‘Golly, what’s wrong?’ She peered. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Awful! You’re so pale, and your hair’s all lank and greasy and you’re still in your dressing-gown, for heaven’s sake. Are you ill?’

  Spotting a convenient lie, I scurried towards it. Sniffed hard. ‘I haven’t been awfully well actually, but I’m feeling mu
ch better now.’ I nodded bravely. ‘I was just going up to shower. But how are you, Pen?’ I deflected neatly. ‘Lovely to see you.’ I returned her embrace, horribly aware that I hadn’t brushed my teeth and my dressing-gown was probably a bit ripe.

  ‘Really well.’ She beamed, then looked concerned. ‘But you should have said you were ill, Henny – I wouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not ill ill, just – you know. A bit under the weather.’

  ‘Well, you look ghastly. Oh – these are for you.’ She turned and tossed the flowers neatly into the sink. ‘I had a feeling it might be coals to Newcastle, but obviously not, judging by the state of your pots. I passed a terrific garden centre on the edge of your village, incidentally; you should pop in. I was a bit early so I nipped in and got all my winter pansies. Only white ones, of course,’ she added quickly, and I made a mental note in my taste file that pansies were fine so long as they were virginal.

  ‘Oh, and this is for Marcus.’ She tossed me something mauve and frilly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A lavender cushion. Someone at work swears by it, says it has him sleeping like a baby in moments. You just tuck it under your pillow –’

  ‘And Bob’s your uncle. Or not, in Marcus’s case,’ I said wryly. ‘Thanks, Penny, but we have actually been down the lavender route. The bedroom smelled like a tart’s boudoir for a while, but with limited success. I think he’s back on the Chinese potions at the moment.’

  ‘Ah. Still a problem then?’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t say that …’

  Personally I thought my husband’s obsession with insomnia was his own private fantasy. I’d been lying next to him for nigh on fourteen years, and as far as I could tell the man slept like a baby, but he was convinced he only averaged about four hours a night. Every morning I was lucky enough to receive a detailed account of precisely how many hours he’d slept and which remedy – ranging from the herbal to hard prescription drugs to be used only in extremis – he’d resorted to. Currently, we even had a star chart on the back of the bedroom door which he filled in assiduously with coloured pencils, thus managing to turn sleep deprivation, literally, into an art form. I tossed the cushion up and caught it.

  ‘Thanks for this though. I’ll pop it in my undies drawer instead. Do it now, while I go and get dressed.’

  ‘I’ll help myself to a drink then, shall I?’ she yelled after me as I finally made it to the stairs. ‘Since I’ve only driven about sixty miles to see you and taken a whole day off work?’

  ‘Do!’ I yelled back, ignoring her irony and taking the steps two at a time. ‘It’s in the fridge. Oh – Angus.’ I cannoned into him at the top of the stairs. ‘Get Penny a drink, would you?’

  ‘OK. Can I have one?’

  I stared. ‘Don’t be utterly ridiculous, of course you can’t. You’re fourteen!’

  ‘So? I’d be on a bottle a day if I lived in France. Piers’s mum lets him have that when they go to their château in Normandy.’

  ‘Well, bully for Piers,’ I snorted, wondering not for the first time if we’d been right to send Angus to a school where his proximity to minor aristocracy and sons of film stars gave him delusions of grandeur. Next, it wouldn’t just be the wine he wanted, but the château as well.

  ‘And find her a decent glass, Angus,’ I yelled as I ran to my room. I stopped. Hurried back to the landing. ‘Not one of those horrid dishwasher-stained ones,’ I hissed as he mooched languidly down.

  ‘Your poor Mum,’ I heard Penny say as he went back into the kitchen. ‘Not well?’

  ‘Oh no, she’s fine,’ said Angus in surprise. ‘She always looks like that. Never gets out of her dressing-gown unless she’s going somewhere.’

  I ground my teeth and gripped the banister rail tight, shutting my eyes and counting to ten as the kitchen door swung shut, muffling their next exchange. When I opened them again, I stood for a moment, gazing through the huge landing window opposite. The garden stretched away, past the hideous blue trampoline which blotted the landscape, and down to the stream at the bottom, fast-moving and fringed with ancient willows and limes, their leaves just turning russet now and dripping aesthetically in the water. On the other side of the stream the paddocks rolled up the gentle slope to the hills beyond, where cows grazed in pure Constable country. A charming pastoral scene. A perfect rural idyll. And the estate agent had said as much, as he’d proudly waved his arm at this very window.

  ‘Look at that! You won’t get a better view than that and still have your husband home in time for supper. Nothing to be seen for miles.’

  This much was perfectly true. Nothing could be seen for miles; not a dicky-bird. Well, no, quite a few of those actually – but no people. A bucolic dream house in the heart of the Kentish countryside: a long, low whitewashed farm with an acre of garden, a couple of lush paddocks, a stream running through the middle and, just for good measure, a handful of ducks gratuitously thrown in by the vendor. And I’d picked it myself, this house. Plucked it from the pages of Country Life, not six weeks after Marcus had floated his company, when our bank balance had changed colour miraculously overnight from red to the verdant green of the hills beyond.

  ‘That’s the one!’ I’d said, running in to show him as he read the Financial Times in the bath in our Holland Park townhouse. ‘That’s the one I want, Marcus!’

  And I’d said it again a week later, when I saw it through the rain-spattered windows of the car as we parked at the end of the track, getting out eagerly to pick our way down the pot-holed drive, splashing through the puddles. I couldn’t get to it fast enough. It was all I’d ever wanted. And I’d wanted it so badly. And now …I straightened up. Took a deep breath. Well, now I’d got it.

  Angus was outside now. I could see him sauntering across the paddock, tall and loose limbed, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched, heading for the barn where his quad bike was kept. Off to burn up a few fields, no doubt; off to roar up those hills to the woods. I smiled. Lovely for him. Lovely. And for Lily too. A wonderful fairy-tale retreat to come back to from boarding-school. No doubt she was trotting around on her pony even now. Maybe that was it, I pondered, narrowing my eyes thoughtfully at the view. The fact that they came back to it. Remembering Penny downstairs, I went off down the passage to change.

  Not wanting to appear in my usual uniform of jeans and bobbly jumper, I eschewed the jumble of perpetually recycled clothes on my chair and opened my wardrobe. The door almost creaked with misuse, and mysteriously, everything inside appeared to have shrunk. I finally came down incongruously, but rather defiantly, dressed in a maroon velvet skirt and a T-shirt of Angus’s proclaiming the legend FCUK.

  Penny raised her eyes, but didn’t comment. She was sitting primly on a stool at my recently commissioned beech wood island in the centre of my kitchen, legs crossed, chin up, looking horribly punchy. In fact, she looked for all the world as if she were about to chair Newsnight. As the credits rolled and the music started, she mutated into Kirsty Wark, complete with quizzical gleam and – I’d swear – a hint of a belligerent Scottish accent.

  ‘Angus tells me you’ve been watching television all morning,’ she said accusingly, cutting to the chase.

  And I hadn’t even got my foot in the door. Hadn’t even crossed the terracotta threshold.

  ‘Yes, I do occasionally,’ I agreed blithely, making for the cupboard where the glasses were kept and deciding at the last minute to bluff this one out. ‘Some women turn to yoga or Pilates to relieve the stress, but I find Home and Away does it for me. Don’t you ever indulge?’

  She looked horrified. ‘NEVER.’

  ‘Well actually, I only do it occasionally, Pen,’ I said cravenly, caving in dramatically. ‘I was only really switching it off because Angus had been watching all morning.’

  ‘Henny, is everything all right?’ she asked, ignoring my last lie.

  ‘Yes, of course it is,’ I said testily. ‘What d’you mean?’ I poured myself a glass of wine and perched
opposite her at the island.

  ‘Well, I’ve been a bit worried about you recently.’

  ‘Recently? What d’you mean, recently, I haven’t seen you recently!’ I laughed.

  ‘No, but on the phone. And actually, that’s sort of why I’ve come down.’

  ‘Oh?’ This sounded ominous. I shifted nervously on my stool.

  ‘You just don’t seem to have the same skippy enthusiasm for this place as you did when you bought it. You were full of it last summer, and now you seem a bit – I don’t know. Lukewarm. Deflated about the whole thing. I know your dad being ill has rocked you, but on the phone the other day you almost groaned when I asked you about your plans for the garden.’

  ‘Nonsense, I’m not deflated – you just obviously caught me on a less buoyant day, Penny, that’s all. Blimey, I can’t be like a helium balloon all the time. I’ve got to get down to the nuts and bolts of living in this sodding rural idyll, haven’t I?’

  With these last, immoderate words hanging suspended in the air, I slipped off my stool and turned to take refuge in the fridge, opening the door and peering in balefully, pretending to get lunch. Half a lemon and a sweaty packet of Cheddar stared back at me, where there should have been a Waitrose cooked chicken and some Parma ham. Damn. I’d fully intended to get them.

  ‘And it’s nothing to do with Dad, incidentally,’ I said quietly, finding a bag of salad. ‘He’s been like that for years now. It’s hardly likely to hit me between the eyes just because I’ve moved house, is it?’

  ‘No. Right. Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. And I’ll say no more. You’re like a pig in clover here and that’s the end of it.’

  I sighed. Turned. ‘Well, all right, if you must know, I am slightly …’ I hesitated ‘…less euphoric about this place than I was a year ago.’

  She boggled at this admission. ‘Are you? But, God – why? I mean, it is idyllic, and so incredibly green-making for the rest of us urbanites. Why? It was your heart’s desire a year ago!’

  ‘I know,’ I said miserably, reaching up to get a cheese-grater out of the cupboard.