Lessons in Love

Steve Burney, in the library with the dagger.

Merry Christmas, Sweetie.

I will love you for ever. S. xxx

Which he had to have given to her at around the same time he had been sleeping with Lucy Stroud and Carol what’s-her-face from Requisitions, and very possibly Anna, although nobody was quite sure if that was just Steve’s wishful thinking, and as Anna had now moved to Shrewsbury they might never find out. It had occurred to Jane that he had probably bought the knives as a job lot and had the evidence tags photocopied to save time.

She glanced down at the paper knife on the kitchen table. Damned shame she hadn’t stabbed him in the library.

She had found out about Steve a couple of weeks ago, actually 11 days, 18 hours and 51 minutes ago, when Lucy had taken her to one side at work, and said, ‘Actually, Jane, there is something I think that you ought to know,’ in a way that Jane knew wasn’t about paperclip allocation. Apparently everyone already knew about Steve, from the man on the mop in Janitorial Services, right through to the heads of departments. Humiliating didn’t even come close.

Steve had probably been rolling around on the natural cream wool carpet in front of his bloody woodburner with one of them while Jane’s perfectly wrapped present sat there, all innocent and unaware, under Steve’s delightfully decked, colour-coordinated, non-shedding lodge-pole pine. The bastard.

Steven James Burney—Jane let the name roll around her mouth even though the sound of it made her feel sick. They had been together almost a year and in quiet moments she had got to the point of trying out her name with his: ‘Mrs Jane Burney, Mr and Mrs Burney Mills, Mr and Mrs Mills Burney. Mrs Jane Burney-Mills’—although she had drawn the line at actually practising her signature, at least in public where anyone might see her. There was still a photo of them on a weekend break in Rome tucked under a magnet on the fridge door. Side by side at the Trevi Fountain. She couldn’t bring herself to take it down. Not yet.

Moving to Buckbourne had meant to be her bright new start. Her mother had suggested it a couple of years ago when Jane’s life had seemed to have lost direction.

‘Janey, what you need is a change, darling. Take a new job, rent your house out, sell your house—do something, anything. Go travelling, be feckless. You need to go wild, get drunk, let your hair down while it’s still your natural colour. You know what your trouble is, don’t you? You’ve always been too good, too steady, too bloody sensible. I really don’t know where I went wrong.’ At which point her mother had paused and looked at herself in the glass door of the kitchen dresser, turning to try to catch herself in profile. Then she said, ‘I’m thinking of getting my nose pierced, what do you think?’

‘Don’t,’ said Jane, not looking up from her lunch. ‘They look like you haven’t wiped your nose, and besides, you fainted when they gave the cat its injections.’

Her mother sniffed. ‘You should be living with someone by now, married even. I’d like to be a grandma some day.’ She’d paused. ‘Obviously not for a while yet but I’d like to at least have the chance. What is it with you and men? Give you a room full of men to choose from and you’ll pick the bastard every time. What about the one who was married with five kids? Will we ever forget Edward and that wife of his and those little ginger mop-tops chasing you through Debenhams, screaming, “That woman is sleeping with my daddy”?’

‘He told me he was separated,’ Jane had said, while attacking a big bowl of nachos, sour cream and guacamole.

‘Shame that he hadn’t mentioned it to his wife.’

‘Oh, right, and you’re so successful with men. What about André?’

Her mother had sniffed and topped up their wine glasses. ‘Which of us truly knows our own minds at twenty? And he was terribly sweet.’

‘His mum came round to help collect his things when he moved out.’

‘Charming woman. I’ve still got one of his Airfix kits somewhere.’

‘And Geno? The transvestite kleptomaniac?’

‘That’s the trouble with you, Jane, you’ve always been so damned judgemental; he was lovely—fabulous taste in shoes, and look at the sitting room. I’d never have put those colours together. He still sends me letters from San Francisco. He’s in an open prison now, which is so much nicer for him. They let them shop on the Internet and everything. He bought the most fabulous ball gown on eBay—although the UV is playing havoc with his skin, apparently. I’ve been sending him Nivea.’

‘We are talking successful relationships here, Mum, not skin care. You know, years of fidelity, Mrs and Mrs Right wandering off arm in arm, sharing their golden years, shuffling round garden centres, blocking the roads with touring caravans. Happy ever after.’

Jane’s mum had sniffed. ‘At least my relationships are colourful. If you’re going to have your heart broken at least do it with some panache, some élan. It’s time you got a life.’

‘Mum, I’m twenty-seven. I’ve got a few good years left in me yet.’

‘Um, that’s what we all say,’ said her mum, topping up her wine glass again.

And so, for once Jane had taken her advice, sold her house, got a new job in a half-decent town, had a makeover at Curl Up and Dye, and voilà here she was, back to square one with a good haircut.

Within three months of moving to Buckbourne, billed as an up-and-coming market town on the edge of the fen by the estate agents, Steve Burney—six foot something, with broad shoulders and a big crinkly smile—had dropped into the library. He worked at County Hall in Human Resources and had come to check up on how she was settling in. Fifteen minutes later he asked her out for coffee and the rest was history.

She glanced up at the clock, trying to ignore the great raw pain in her chest: 11 days, 18 hours and 56 minutes of history. Apparently he was notorious, Lucy said.

‘Look, I’m really sorry to be the one who tells you this, Jane, but everybody knows about Steve,’ she’d explained, handing Jane a tissue. ‘Really.’

Today Jane and Steve had planned to have lunch at the pub in Holkham and then walk his Labrador, Sandy, on the beach to Wells. That was a proper relationship. Lunch, long walks, Labradors.

Jane sniffed back another volley of tears. Bastard. And then she turned the letter over and took another look at the address on the prize offer. It read: ‘Ms J. Mills, 9 Creswell Close.’

It was an easy mistake to make. Jane lived at 9 Creswell Road, which was about two miles away from Creswell Close, a new exclusive executive housing development being built right on the edge of town, in the mature park-lands surrounding Creswell House, and about two million miles away in terms of income and aspiration.

Creswell Close boasted elegant, architect-designed town houses, integral garages and individually landscaped gardens, solid granite worktops and en suite everything, while Creswell Road boasted about how hard it was and how it could burp the national anthem after eight pints of Stella, and had a man who slept in the end terrace, the burned-out one with boarded-up windows, who could be found most mornings eating out of wheelie bins.

Jane, totally house-detailed out, having gone round and round looking for somewhere to live on endless cold wet days the previous year, had bought number 9 after the man at the estate agents had bandied about words like ‘undiscovered treasure’, ‘colourful’, ‘bohemian’, ‘urban renewal’ and ‘ripe for gentrification’. Which her mum pointed out, after she’d exchanged contracts, meant shabby as hell and dirt cheap.

Even so, it all fitted in with her plan for a bright sparkly new life, although despite numerous attempts and an Arts Council grant to paint a mural on the bus shelter Creswell Road remained resolutely feral.

As had her life.

The house in Creswell Road and the job as community project development manager in the new regional library were meant to mark a brave bold new beginning, not another dead end.

Jane glanced out of the kitchen window across the towpath that backed on to Creswell Road. On the far side of the river, out beyond the galvanised iron railings topped with razor wire, and the skip full of brick rubble and shopping trolleys, lay the municipal playing fields, mature trees, the cricket pavilion—almost the open uninterrupted views promised on the estate agent’s brochure. The one notable interruption was Gladstone, the tramp who was currently sitting on her garden wall, humming a medley from Cats while unwrapping the ham roll Jane had left in tinfoil on the top of her wheelie bin for him. OK, so one could reason it only encouraged him to be feckless but it was so much less stressful than seeing him sift through the detritus of her life to find a square meal.

He’d already told her she ought to eat more fruit and vegetables. ‘Those ready meals, they’re all additives and E-numbers, you know. Tartrazine, monosodium glutamate,’ Gladstone lingered lovingly over the words like jewels in a box, ‘and Lord only knows what else they put in there. And you realise that that isn’t real meat, don’t you? They shape it out of all the stuff they scrape and blast off the carcasses with a power washer,’ he’d said cheerily one morning, as she passed him on the way to catch the bus to work. ‘Meat slurry.’

It had come to something when tramps commented on your dietary habits. Especially when they spent the rest of their time talking to God and any number of imaginary friends.

Jane glanced down at Ms J. Mills’ post. She could hardly just put it back in the post box now it had been opened, could she? How did that look? Maybe she ought to nip down to the post office and explain.

‘So, you’ve opened them all, have you?’ asked an imaginary clerk suspiciously. ‘Would you care to explain exactly why you did that? Make a habit of opening other people’s post, do you?’ Jane turned the letters over; opening someone else’s mail was probably illegal as well.

Who was going to believe she had opened Ms J. Mills’ post by accident? There had to be—she counted—eight letters here. They’d take one look at the new credit card and assume Jane had already booked a holiday, bought a sofa and had her legs waxed.

The other Ms J. Mills was ex-directory, which really left only one option: Jane would have to drive over to Creswell Close to deliver the post herself. She would explain, and then grovel and laugh and make light of it—possibly.

‘You see, it was all just a silly mistake,’ she’d twitter in a gushy falsetto to a woman who looked uncannily like the clerk in her previous fantasy encounter. Jane paused; even her imagination was cutting corners. What hope was there?

She went upstairs, peeled off her jarmies, had a quick shower and slipped on jeans and a shirt. From the landing window Jane could see that Gladstone had already moved on to number 5. (The people at number 7 were away, possibly on holiday, possibly on remand. Jane had heard a lot of banging and shouting a few nights earlier but hadn’t liked to look.) Number 5 usually put out a couple of slices of fruit cake and an apple. Why Gladstone wasn’t the size of a barrage balloon God alone knew.

Balanced on top of the bin behind number 3 were a large carton of orange juice, an overripe banana and a bag of crisps. Beyond that, down past number 1 where Creswell Road turned abruptly into Lower East Row, it was hard to tell. Jane screwed up her eyes. It crossed her mind that what she really needed was a pair of binoculars. The leafy suburbs had badger watch, while out here on the towpath behind Creswell Road they had tramp watch. Right on cue Gladstone shuffled slowly downstream on his dining foray. He appeared to be singing and grooming his whiskers. Bill Oddie would have been so proud.

Jane picked up her handbag and the letters, and then as an afterthought clipped her library security pass to her top pocket. At the very least it would help prove she was who she said she was.

As Jane drove across town, Buckbourne basked under a cerulean sky. The tightly packed Victorian and Edwardian terraces corralling the town centre rapidly gave way on the far side of the inner ring road to smarter semis and then 1930s detacheds trimmed with trees, then seventies estates and finally nineties and new millennium neo-quaint, with their double-glazed leaded lights, gingerbread-house-style dormers and matching fibreglass chimneys. They in turn opened out on to the new bypass, a series of interlinked mini roundabouts and the out-of-town retail park. Another mile or so round the bypass and Jane was skirting the walled edge of the Creswell Gardens Estate.

She took a left off the next roundabout, down through lush woodland to an impressive set of gates, where a sign printed in swooping copperplate print advertised the development, along with an artist’s impression of the finished area.

Creswell GardensElegant Homes, sympathetically created to reflect the Gracious Living of a Bygone Era. Viewing by Appointment only.