Growing Season Read online

  Praise for Seni Glaister

  ‘Seni Glaister’s latest “up-lit” novel is perfect for fans of last year’s runaway bestseller Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine’ Hello!

  ‘Classic up-lit – literary comfort food for a cold winter’s night’ Saga

  ‘A funny, feel-good tale’ Candis

  ‘Extremely charming’ Sunday Times bestselling author Marian Keyes

  ‘A sheer delight – it will make you laugh and cry in equal measure. Charming beyond belief’ Sunday Times bestselling author Veronica Henry

  ‘A real gem’ Fiona Harper, author of The Memory Collector

  SENI GLAISTER worked as a bookseller for much of her career before founding WeFiFo, the social dining platform, in 2016. Her first novel, The Museum of Things Left Behind, was published in 2015. She lives on a farm in West Sussex with her husband and children.

  Also by Seni Glaister

  The Museum of Things Left Behind

  Mr Doubler Begins Again

  Growing Season

  Seni Glaister

  ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

  Copyright © Seni Glaister 2020

  Seni Glaister asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008285043

  Version 2020-07-08

  Note to Readers

  This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008285029

  For my daughters Poppy and Millie

  And in loving memory of

  Leila Rendel 1882–1969

  Olive Rendel 1889–1973

  Cecily Rendel 1910–1994

  & the other women who

  came before us

  Cut grass lies frail:

  Brief is the breath

  Mown stalks exhale.

  EXCERPT FROM ‘CUT GRASS’ BY PHILIP LARKIN

  Permission kindly given by Faber & Faber

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  About the Author

  Also by Seni Glaister

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Yew Lane was not exactly a lane, but rather a cul-de-sac. It led nowhere in particular but served as the peaceful access to a number of small detached and semi-detached houses. As a no-through-road, it offered few opportunities for passersby to chance upon it; its purpose was simply to deliver the home owners to their front doors whilst also offering a couple of lay-bys just wide enough to accommodate the increasingly frequent delivery vans that liked to turn themselves around indignantly after hurling their parcels carelessly over hedges.

  Each home in Yew Lane had probably once boasted a much larger garden, but these spaces had proven very fruitful to land-hungry developers who could turn one plot into four, each with an easily maintained garden or off-road parking. Gradually those little in between spaces, the scraps of land, the allotments, the wooden framed single garages, the creaky lean-tos and the orchards had all been usurped, largely to the satisfaction of all, except, perhaps, the bees who rued the loss of blossom and the occasional deer who had once supplemented their diets with roses and winter greens but who were now thwarted by the high wooden fences that served to carefully cordon off one property from the next.

  Broome Cottage was the furthest of the properties on the lane, the last before some scrappy woodland that itself led to some more substantial woodland and arable fields beyond. The garden of Broome Cottage was just small enough to have been ignored by prospectors so it remained intact, offering a nice patch of lawn behind the brick-built cottage with its pretty half-hung tiles. Like all the houses in Yew Lane, the garden had a high wooden fence on all sides. Broome Cottage, however, still boasted a small garage and a path led between this and the house to the lawn behind it. The front of the house was north-facing but the garden side of the house was south-facing and, to any future gardener, that was what counted. At the back of the garage, in the corner of the garden, a narrow wooden gate opened on to a public footpath.

  Diana stood on the footpath with her back to these houses and to the woodland below her. She looked through a small gap between the fence post and the gate, quietly observing the arrival of the latest newcomers to Broome Cottage. She had first been alerted by the constant beeping of a removal vehicle reversing the length of Yew Lane and she’d been anxious to find out what sort of neighbour she would have on her hands. The previous gentleman had been elderly, he’d never given Diana any bother, even his ultimate departure had passed without fuss. And then the developers had come in with their skips and scaffolding and she’d watched with concern to see what atrocities they might bestow on the pretty little cottage. But fortunately the house and its small garden had survived the process unscathed.

  Once Diana had begun her vigil, her interest had been further piqued by the intriguin
g young woman who seemed to be coordinating the move. She was very young, not yet thirty, and appeared entirely in charge. But there was something complicated about her, Diana felt. She appeared confident when she greeted the removal men, issuing directions with a clear, happy voice and plying them with tea, demonstrating the genteel manners of a much older woman. But when Diana caught glimpses of her alone, off guard, her face appeared careworn and she often displayed a worried frown as she scurried from place to place.

  Diana had taken up her watch post a number of times, and she was there when the removals van eventually left. She wondered, while she watched the driver gun the big vehicle’s engine to life, why they were always called removal vans. Removal was only half the story. Here, on Yew Lane, it was surely an arrivals van, a vehicle conveying hope and new chapters, emptying out its promises into this nice, neat house.

  Diana was watching, too, when the woman’s partner or husband finally appeared. He was young also, and they were at ease together, but they were more like an older couple with their fire and their fury long behind them. To Diana the two seemed rather alike, physically. It was not the likeness of siblings, but of two pieces from the same jigsaw puzzle. Like her, he wore glasses and these he often pushed up his nose with an index finger, betraying a nervous tic. And like her, he often wore a concerned frown when alone. But Diana was glad to see him pull her into his arms, proudly, as they stood in the lane admiring their new home.

  Diana finally stopped herself from spying on them when the young woman glanced in her direction and seemed to stare at her worriedly, as if she could see right through the fence. Diana froze, then backed a couple of steps away, immediately ashamed of what she had been reduced to.

  Diana retreated.

  Chapter 1

  Danny hadn’t been sleeping but a guttural screech had yanked him from his meditative state of rhythmic breathing to one of immediate alertness. He swung his legs out of bed and was now peering between the curtains into the darkness beyond, his heart thumping wildly in his chest.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he asked, his voice strained in the silence of the bedroom.

  ‘What was what?’ asked Sam, sleepily, beside him.

  ‘Did you hear that noise? It sounded like someone’s being murdered out there. I heard a scream. Did you hear it?’ Danny let the curtains drop and stumbled around the bed, feeling his way around a room that was still menacing in its unfamiliarity. He fumbled in the darkness for his dressing gown, unhooking it from the back of the door and wrapping it around him tightly.

  He returned to his watch-post, perching himself on the side of the bed, and once again he pressed his face to the glass, squinting into the raven night.

  From her prone position beside him Sam answered him through a yawn. ‘Probably just a fox. Or a cat maybe? Or an owl. It could have been any one of the holy trinity of night noises. Welcome to the countryside,’ she said, with an exaggerated yawn.

  Danny didn’t smile, he continued to peer into the dark. ‘That was no fox. I know what a fox sounds like. A fox sounds like metal.’

  Sam, fully alert now, processed his logic and laughed, switching on the light. ‘You idiot. Foxes don’t sound like metal.’

  ‘They do! They make a very distinctive sound. Turn the light off, I can’t see a thing.’

  ‘You mean the sound of dustbins? Foxes make the sound of metal because you’ve only ever heard them rooting through a dustbin? Jesus, Danny. We got out of London just in time to rescue you.’ She turned off the light again and stared up at the dark ceiling above her, smiling.

  Danny, feeling vulnerable in his boxer shorts, kept his dressing gown on and flopped back on the bed beside his wife. She was laughing at him kindly, he knew, but he also felt idiotic. His heart was still pounding which made him feel more exposed still.

  After a few minutes of agitated pause, he sat up again and returned to his vigil. ‘What else did you think it could be? A cat? What the hell do they do to their cats in the countryside? If it was a cat, it was definitely being strangled.’

  ‘Sex. Cat sex. It’s a very noisy business apparently and I don’t think it is always consensual.’

  Sam could see Danny’s face reflected in the dark glass. She could see he was grimacing at the thought of noisy, bucolic, non-consensual sex. ‘What about owls? Is owl sex noisy too?’ he asked, fearfully, as if not really wishing to know the answer.

  ‘I somehow doubt it. I think if the noise was made by an owl, it was probably just seeing off a predator. Or perhaps it had just made a violent kill, and is now swooping low across the fields with the small body of a dead rodent hanging limply from its outstretched talons.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Samantha. That’s disgusting. If I’d known the countryside was so violent, I would have stayed in SW11.’

  Sam continued to smile in the darkness. ‘I’m teasing. I have no idea why an owl screeches or even if that’s what the noise was, but I expect one of the neighbours will be able to tell me. All I know from my two-week advantage of living in the countryside, is that cats, foxes and owls account for most of the night noises around here.’

  Sam reached her hand out to find Danny’s. They lay together companionably as Danny steadied his breathing by matching each inhale and exhale to hers.

  ‘Go to sleep, champ,’ said Sam, conscious of Danny’s unnatural breathing pattern.

  ‘I’m not sure I can.’ Danny’s heart was still thumping painfully.

  ‘You’ll get used to it. Honestly, you will. Trust me, I barely slept the first couple of nights here.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked, reassured.

  ‘Yes really.’

  Danny wriggled closer and, taking her warmth to supplement his strength, his breathing relaxed into something approximating sleep.

  Sam felt a flicker of guilt in the face of Danny’s trust in her. Once again, she had lied to her husband. The truth was, she had actually slept deeply from her very first night in the countryside. She loved falling asleep to the nocturnal babble, marvelling at the variety of sounds she’d been introduced to that she’d been quite unaware existed. She loved the darkness and this fortress of a house with no shared walls. In London she had been able to hear the coat-hangers rattling in her neighbour’s cupboard. The cupboard must have been just behind her head and its owners must have been very uncertain about their outfit choices because they seemed to scrape the coat-hangers back and forth every evening and every morning with predictable and prolonged determination. Here, though, the house noises were her house noises and the punctuations from the outdoor world were welcome reminders that her domain had suddenly become so much broader.

  Sam had moved to the new house two weeks ahead of Danny so that she could be there to oversee the tedious little tasks that would have rattled him. She’d upgraded the broadband, hooked them up to Sky TV and had found a plumber to turn the adequate shower into a power shower and to install a water filter under the kitchen sink. She had hoped that these little details would make it feel less traumatic for Danny when he eventually arrived. Ahead of her move, Sam had been dreading this period alone, imagining intolerable loneliness after her busy London life, but the chores she’d allocated to herself had swept up the hours comprehensively and completing these little missions had helped turn the house into her home immediately. She’d already come to love it inordinately.

  Sam had campaigned for the move from London persistently and strategically, for as long as she and Danny had been married. But whilst her arguments for pastoral life were sound and important, they ultimately had very little impact on Danny’s eventual agreement.

  Sam had finally chanced upon her winning arguments when, in quick succession, she had stumbled across two important facts for the Home County she’d set her heart on. The first was a social media rumour that suggested a new train operator was being lined up to take over the existing service and, accompanying this speculation, there were soon whispers of dramatically improved schedules and greatly shortened commuter time
s. Any fool could deduce that the knock-on effect would be a positive impact on property prices along the entire length of the train line, but Sam knew Danny well enough not to spell this out. He loved to be the most cunning man in the room. Rather than draw his attention to the financial imperative, she’d talked about the improvement to his life that a shorter commute from the countryside would deliver and she had then stepped away from the conversation, allowing him some space to calculate the monetary benefit to the return on investment should this train service go ahead.

  In a similar vein, whilst idly stirring a risotto at the stove she’d read an article out loud from a local estate agent’s report to Danny, as he uncorked a bottle of wine. ‘Heavens, there’s a new John Lewis store opening up nearby,’ she’d said. ‘Listen to this,’ she continued, ‘a John Lewis or Waitrose store opening in a new area can impact property prices by seven per cent!’ She allowed this fact to sink in before continuing. ‘Ludicrous. Aren’t people silly to let those sorts of things influence their decisions.’ To demonstrate her utter disdain for consumerism she had tossed the paper in the recycling bin but she knew the information would have landed in her husband’s calculator of a brain and, coming so fast on the heels of her train line propaganda, she felt confident that she’d hammered two impactful nails into the coffin that served as a basement flat in an up and coming area of South-West London.

  And of course, her campaign had worked. Here she was, sharing the new king-sized bed for the first time with her husband, listening to the little creaks and groans that were the rhythm of the house she loved and, here she was, blending these with the outside noises and Danny’s breathing.

  She knew she should feel guilty every time she lied to her husband, but it seemed to Sam that he rarely wanted to hear the truth and that was probably because he knew he would not be advantaged by it. Some of the harder things could be spoken, but only once they’d been repackaged into a palatable bite, whilst other things were better left unsaid altogether. And there were more things, still, that Sam couldn’t even admit to herself, let alone to him.