The Empty Nesters

by Nina Bell

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Clover Jones and Laura Dangerfield have been best friends since their children were born. They share holidays, sleepovers, school runs and childcare; they are like one big family. But all families have secrets. When the children leave home, Clover and Laura's lives and marriages change forever, and the old rules on love and loyalty no longer apply. Without the children, can their marriages - and friendship - survive?

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 416

Sample

‘I don’t want to talk about Alice,’ said Clover Jones to Laura Dangerfield.


They hesitated under the graceful porch. Clover read out the inscription on a brass plaque: ‘Campbell, Brown. Solicitors.
Purveyors in death, divorce and moving house.’


‘Does it really say that?’ Laura sounded startled.

‘No, of course not. But those are the three reasons why anyone would visit a solicitor, aren’t they?’

‘I think there’s something called tort as well,’ said Laura.

‘Tort is just an upmarket tart, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘I see we’re back to Alice again.’ Laura smiled a wicked smile.

‘Come on,’ said Clover, acknowledging the remark with a grimace. ‘If we’re going in, we’re going in.’

The front door had panels inset with strips of mirror glass. Clover could see slices of themselves – her own thick red hair
tied up, and the neat dark edge of Laura’s bob. They looked good in thin strips. The edge of Laura’s jacket was camellia pink.
And Clover, in the slivers of glass, wore the soft greys and creams of a pebble beach.


Perhaps everything – and everybody – looks good if you don’t see the whole picture.

Behind them was a bustling street. People hurried about their ordinary lives, thinking about what they would buy for dinner.


With a final nod from Laura, Clover pressed the buzzer and the door swung open. In front of them was a quiet pastel hallway,
its whispered secrets and pain all bundled up into neat files. This was where those ordinary lives were torn up into tiny
pieces.


Behind them two mothers ushered a group of children across the road. ‘Why aren’t they at school?’ asked Laura, perhaps still
deferring the moment when words would finally have to be said. Written down. Turned into facts.


‘Half term? Holidays? Remember them?’ Clover wondered if she could change places with those women, their lives measured out
in school runs, half terms, overladen supermarket trolleys and the need to get from work to sports day or the school play.
Every moment was tightly scheduled but she could see, from the way one little girl held her mother’s hand, and the way the
two women spoke to each other, that their lives were full of love and friendship.


And if she could magically become one of those women again, would she?

‘Come on,’ one of the women shouted to a little boy who had stopped at a shop window. ‘We haven’t got time.’

Clover looked at her watch. ‘Neither have we.’

They turned left, into a room where a receptionist sat at a big modern desk.

‘Good morning,’ she said with a polite, practised smile. She looked from one to the other, obviously trying to identify the
client. ‘Can I help you, Mrs …?’


A Year Earlier

The arrangements for the last day of term were as complex as aircraft holding patterns over Heathrow at the height of summer.
Five sets of parents would take a table at the St Crispian’s leavers’ ball and five children – no, not children any more,
thought Clover – five teenagers would be on another table with their friends, as far as possible from their parents at the other end of the marquee.


Getting involved in the ball took Clover’s mind off the yawning gap that was about to open up in her life. Today, and from
now on, she would be a spectator in her daughter’s life. She was no longer the cornerstone, the anchor … the pivot around
which Holly’s existence revolved. But, on the other hand, there would always be milk in the fridge when she wanted a cup of
tea. She would be able to find a pen when she wanted to write a note. And she and George might finally get to drive from the
east coast of America to the west.


Clover dropped Holly, Lola and Jamie off at school for the last time, at eight o’clock in the morning on the last day, marking
all the ‘lasts’ with a sense of foreboding. Clover, Laura and Lola’s mother Alice had shared the school run for years. They
had ferried Ben and Holly Jones, Jamie Dangerfield and Lola Fanshawe to and from school, Cubs, Brownies, rehearsals, football, riding lessons and – increasingly
– exams, parties and sleepovers. Alice and Laura were Clover’s closest friends, and their children were also part of the same
gang. It worked beautifully. They holidayed together. Exchanged childcare. It was like having a huge extended family.


Clover and Laura were the original core. Laura and Tim lived in an immaculate eighteenth-century yellow brick farmhouse on
the slope of an idyllic valley. Their view consisted of fields, a half-timbered black and white medieval cottage, two barns,
a herd of rare-breed cattle and a wood. Inside, their house was tastefully painted in shades of blue, terracotta and off-white
with a Shaker kitchen and smart cream sofas.


Two miles away, in the raggle-taggle village of Pilgrim’s Worthy, Clover and George lived at Fox Hollow, an extended Victorian
cottage with a front door painted the grey-green of lichen. It shared a flint garden wall with St Mary’s church, and was shaded
by ecclesiastical yew trees and the Norman church’s stone tower. The interior of Fox Hollow was a jumble of colour and pattern,
with a scrubbed pine kitchen table, a claw-footed bath beneath a sunny window and apologetically squashy sofas, one of which
was usually occupied by Diesel, a grey lurcher from a rescue kennels. The Joneses’ cats, Bonnie and Clyde – formerly feral
strays but now plump, smug and sleepy – occupied the high ground: perching on a Welsh dresser stacked with blue-and-white
china, a distressed grey wooden settle or the top of a battered oak chest with dozens of small, carefully labelled drawers.
Clover was a magpie, picking up anything – and anybody – that could be rescued.


Then, five years later, Alice had bought a dilapidated sixties bungalow at the other end of Pilgrim’s Worthy. It had looked
like a garage dropped at random on the edge of the village, but she had extended it into a much-photographed example of contemporary living with huge windows looking out on the hop gardens
and pastures beyond.


Geography had drawn the three very different women together, as Pilgrim’s Worthy was almost out of the St Crispian’s catchment
area. Although, as Laura often pointed out, Alice didn’t figure in the school runs quite as often as the other two. Lola spent
much of the time living with the Joneses, while Alice, who was a single mother, worked tirelessly and travelled the world
setting up her mail-order clothing company, Shirts & Things. She needed help. So Alice and Lola joined Diesel, Bonnie and
Clyde – and, of course, George, Ben and Holly – under Clover’s wing.


As tradition dictated, the teenagers kicked off the elaborate set of Last Day of School rites with the exchange of boys’ and
girls’ uniforms. They photographed each other, the boys in skirts, the girls striking poses in askew ties and blazers.


Then they shoehorned themselves into their leavers’ uniforms, in a style unchanged since the eighteenth century. St Crispian’s
was one of the oldest grammar schools in the country and behaved like a private school. It had traditions, and these were
encapsulated in thousands of tiny buttons, done up by a hundred and ten excited pairs of hands. Fifty-two pairs of newly hairy
male legs tackled the intricacies of sock suspenders for the first – and probably only – time in their lives. More photographs
were taken as groups formed and reformed in the quadrangle: the boys, then the girls, the boys and the girls, the rugby team,
the netball team, the drama group, the best friends, the jazz club, the Crew – Holly, Lola, Sandeep, Adam, Lucy and Jamie,
plus about eight others, who’d been together, with a few exceptions, since they joined the school in Nursery.


They all shuffled in to the school hall for prize-giving. Laura bustled around, petite and trim in a neat turquoise jacket,
buzzing with enthusiasm. ‘Such a lovely brooch,’ Clover heard her say to one woman. ‘I love your hair,’ to another, and ‘Haven’t
you lost weight?’ to a third. When Laura was nervous she went on a charm offensive but, occasionally, she dropped her voice
and hissed to Clover: ‘Where’s Tim? I’ll kill him if he’s late. His only son’s last-ever school assembly … ’


Clover spotted Tim and George at the door, waiting at the back until the aisles were clearer. They reminded her of two very
different kinds of dog, who nevertheless relaxed completely in each other’s company. George was a friendly golden retriever,
while Tim was a sleek, dark greyhound. Clover sometimes wondered if Laura had got him out of a catalogue of suitable husbands.
He was smart and well-groomed, with classic, tapered dark hair – short, but not too short. He wore well-cut suits, always
partnered with a crisp white shirt left open at the neck. Conventional but not quite, as befits a well-known architect.


George, taller and broader, often looked as if he might have dressed in a hurry, his brown hair slightly windblown. His expression
was usually vague and amiable, hiding an intelligent and observant mind. Sometimes, when she looked at holiday snaps, Clover
could see that she and George had come to look like each other: hair that only stayed neat for a few minutes, crumpled linens,
cosy jumpers and slightly creased cottons in the colours of the sea, the sky and the countryside. Maybe that was what twenty
years together did.


As parents and grandparents settled themselves in their seats, thinning the press in the aisles, Clover spotted her father.

‘There you are,’ he said, pinching her cheek affectionately. His startling blue eyes, framed by bristling white eyebrows that
reminded her of a lobster’s antennae, were almost on a level with hers. He took her elbow. ‘Your mother would have loved to
be here.’


‘I wish she was here too. And George’s parents. It’s sad that you’re the only grandparent who’s made it this far.’ She smiled
at him, once again registering the unfamiliar change in height. Surely she’d always looked up at him? Colin Stewart had always
been her strong, brave, wise father. The person she turned to for advice and consolation. Three years ago Clover’s mother
had died, and he had seemed instantly diminished. But, at eighty-two, he was still fiercely independent. He organised his
strange, new existence with military precision and rebuffed all offers of help. He was still Dad. She occasionally detected
the whiff of something not quite right in his kitchen but, as he always pointed out, she was no great respecter of ‘use by’
dates herself.


And now he seemed to be evaporating. She frowned. She’d heard of bones shrinking, but whole inches? Clover looked down at
her shoes. She was wearing high heels. That must be it.


She often found the same sudden adjustment with Ben and Holly. Sometimes they seemed to come downstairs about two inches taller
than they’d been when they went to bed. Clover always looked down at her feet, and then theirs, to see if the solution lay
with the shoes they were each wearing, and had often been surprised to find that they were both barefoot.


Laura’s parents – sprightly seventy-somethings who hiked in the Lake District and sat on charitable committees – followed
Clover and her father in, and they all settled down. There was just one empty chair in their row.


Clover was saving it for Alice Fanshawe.

The headmaster stood up and welcomed them all. As he worked his way through the names and prizes, Clover could feel herself
on the edge of her seat. Would Alice make it in time to see Lola pick up the Harding Prize, the main academic trophy? Surely she would? The other parents thought Alice was
neglectful and careless, but in Clover’s opinion she had a pin-sharp awareness of what Lola was doing at any time. She just
wasn’t always there to do it with her.


There was a scuffle at the back as the door opened and closed. The headmaster paused, as if to register the new arrival. Alice,
tawny and golden, with olive skin that tanned easily and sharp, shiny hair the colour of autumn leaves, knew how to make an
entrance. At five foot ten she dressed like the models in her catalogues: slubby silks and soft cashmere in muddy, subtle
colours with little details that women noticed and men didn’t. Chunky, pearly buttons or iridescent silk threads or a bias
cut on a skirt. And very high heels. Alice was fast becoming the very image of success.


There was a certain amount of whispering and shuffling, then Alice glided down into the empty seat next to Clover. ‘Phew,
nearly didn’t make it,’ she whispered. ‘Useless meeting went on for ever.’


‘It’s fine,’ murmured Clover. George raised his hand in greeting and Laura leaned across them both, fizzing with warmth and
fury as usual. ‘How lovely to see you,’ she whispered. ‘Love your jacket!’ She fingered the soft fabric. ‘That colour is so
great on your skin. Tim was late too! The traffic must be frightful.’


Clover wondered if she should point out that Tim had arrived only a few minutes after they had, along with George. But Tim
could do no right, and Laura would only find something else to criticise.


The headmaster, clearing his throat, carried on.

The prize-giving was interminable, and Clover drifted off, remembering her own last day at her stuffy all-girls school. There’d been no local nightclubs in those days, so they’d all driven to the beach with bottles of cider and wine, making a
makeshift barbecue among the stones and preparing for their very first all-nighter.


By sunrise, there were only six of them left. At four-thirty, a sweep of glimmering pink illuminated the horizon, and the
sea began to sparkle, as if tiny fairy lights were being switched on across its width.


Clover had tugged off her dress. ‘Race you to that little boat. The one moored to the far buoy.’ She’d stripped off her bra
and knickers, and rolled her dress around them, tucking them into the side of the breakwater. Wading naked into the water,
she was exhilarated by its champagne coldness.


She could hear a chorus of objections behind her. ‘It’s a long way away.’ ‘There might be currents.’ ‘What about jelly-fish?’
‘It’s a public beach, suppose someone sees us?’


But she didn’t care. This was about an end to rules and regulations, to the fear of being found in the wrong corridor in the
wrong shoes. It was the beginning of freedom. When the water reached her knees she dived in.


‘Come on,’ she shouted, flicking her hair out of her eyes. She was almost breathless with shock. ‘It’s beautiful.’ The water
was like silk against her naked body. This was what freedom felt like.


Chattering and giggling, the others followed, but as Clover ploughed steadily on she realised that they’d dropped behind.
And when she stopped to tread water, the little boat on its mooring seemed no closer. The distance was deceptive.


‘Clover, come back!’ She could just hear the others shouting, worried.

But I am going to get there, she told herself. I am going to win. It didn’t matter that there was no one else in the race.
It was harder now, pushing against the waves, keeping her breathing steady, and the buoy was still no closer. She could feel the current tugging her away, trying to drag her out to
the sea.


I will get there, she promised herself. This is the beginning of the rest of my life. She began to count. In a hundred strokes
I will get there.


But the current was strong.

In ten strokes I will get there.

In five strokes I will get there.

Freedom was hard, but worth fighting for. She swam towards the sunlight. Just a few more strokes. She would not turn back
now.


Her hand touched the weathered wood of the little boat and the shore, with its five anxious dots, seemed a long way away.

Pausing to catch her breath, she raised her hand to them in a victory wave. She, Clover Stewart, was alone in the great wide
sea. And it felt good. ‘Yay!’ she shouted, but her words disappeared into the breeze.


She began the swim back, working her way across the current rather than fighting it, emerging from the water tired and victorious.

‘We were worried.’ Her friends were drying themselves in the early morning sunshine, their hair tangled like seaweed. ‘If
you’d got into trouble, there was no one to help.’


‘I don’t need help.’ Clover squeezed the water out of her long, red hair. She was often called Coppernob at school and had
always shrugged off the insult. Clover, Coppernob, what did it matter?


Her beating heart and trembling legs told her that she had swum too far out, especially after a night of drinking, and that
even these benign waters could easily be deadly. But she had survived. She would survive.


She sat down, enjoying the rare feeling of the rising sun on her long, white limbs. She wouldn’t be able to lie on the beach
in a few hours. She would burn almost instantly.


They lit cigarettes, sheltering their matches from the gentle breeze and laughing at how difficult it was to light them with
wet hands. Then they spread their clothes on the stones to dry and lay back, letting the rising sun warm their bodies.


Clover awoke with a jerk at the sound of another burst of clapping. Someone had nudged her. Back in the auditorium, blinking,
she saw her husband smile at the sight of Holly, taller and slimmer than Clover had ever been, but with her mother’s mane
of red hair, mounting the steps to accept a prize from the headmaster.


Clover’s last day at school had been a generation ago. She had given up the cigarettes – finally – with her second pregnancy,
and an extra stone had settled around her midriff. Her red hair had faded and she twisted it up into a loose chignon with
a selection of scrappy clips. There was a little too much grey in it, except when Clover put a rinse through. The little boat
moored near the beach had long since gone, and it had been years since Clover swam towards the sun. She not only listened
to the voices on the beach, calling her back. The voices of common sense, of responsibility. She had become one of them.


She clapped as Holly took her book from the headmaster and descended the steps again.

Lola went up for her prize. Sandeep got the Walden Prize, for being head boy, and then, finally, the final words, and people
began to trickle out of the huge hall. Alice smiled and texted someone. George squeezed Clover’s hand. She looked up at his
kind, slightly crumpled face. He looked down at her, with the sympathetic brown eyes that Holly had inherited, and she wondered
– as she often did – how, between them, they’d managed to create someone as vibrantly different, and yet recognisably similar, as Holly. As the pupils shuffled out,
faintly flushed with excitement (and probably, if the truth be known, the odd shot of vodka) Clover realised that that was
it. They were out. Through. ‘We did it,’ whispered Alice. ‘Thank God that’s over.’


‘Yes,’ agreed Clover, her throat tightening. She looked for Holly’s hair streaming out behind her, always distinctive however
packed the crowd. She wanted to hold her daughter in her arms. ‘We did it. Now it’s up to them.’


Colin’s blue eyes were watery in the hot sun. ‘She’s a fine girl,’ he murmured as he watched Holly scream with laughter and
hug her friends. ‘She reminds me of you at that age. Determined. Feisty. Loving life.’ He patted her arm again. ‘This sun
is a little hot for me. I might just pop off now and leave you all to it.’ He bumbled over to Holly and kissed her cheek,
and Clover saw it again. Holly was now so much taller than her grandfather.


Everyone seemed to be changing very quickly.

They could hear Laura, indignant as a terrier, berating Tim for his late appearance, as around two hundred parents shuffled
out into the sunshine, some looking tearful, others checking their phones or clearly thinking about lunch.


Alice replied to a text, then stowed the phone in her bag.

‘Have you told Lola’s father that she won the Harding Prize?’ Clover ventured with a sense that she was trespassing.

Alice responded with a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Stop fishing. You know me better than that. He’s had nothing to do with Lola’s
education so far; why would he want to know anything now?’ She looked around and pulled some cigarettes out of her bag, shielding
her light from the wind then blowing out rings of smoke. ‘I promise you, dearest, that when Lola is ready to know who her
father is, I’ll tell you immediately after that. You will be number two to hear the news. But until then … ’ She raised an eyebrow and took another drag of her cigarette.
‘Life is full of secrets.’


‘Your life may be full of secrets. Mine is really rather straightforward,’ said Clover.

Alice laughed again. Loudly, as if Clover had been very witty.

After more changes of clothing, followed by the ferrying of over-excited, slightly self-conscious teenagers from one place
to another, retrieving items of clothing from lockers and classrooms, packing cars high with artwork, books, files and sports
kit, Clover and George, Laura and Tim, and Alice, found themselves standing in a marquee on the sports field. It was a chilly
July evening, and they were surrounded by the people who had dominated their lives for the past seven years. Or twelve years,
in the case of those who had been there since Nursery.


‘I can’t think why the kids didn’t bring most of the stuff back themselves,’ said Alice. ‘I mean, they’ve hardly had anything
to do since the end of A levels. You’d have thought they could have cleared it all out a bit earlier.’


‘I don’t think retrieving manky sports bags from lost property has been high on their list of priorities.’ Clover kept an
eye out for the rest of their table. ‘Too busy drinking White Lightning or cheap wine in the park and … Oh look, there’s Sheila
Lewis. And Nigel.


Sheila Lewis kissed Clover and Laura with her usual anxious expression. The Lewises were a devout, hard-working couple with
a teenage daughter and three older sons who had left home. They had no idea what long-legged, exuberant Ruby really got up to.


Sheila scanned the marquee with a furrowed brow. ‘You don’t suppose the children will get … well, you know … drunk tonight?
Ruby is practically unconscious after two glasses of wine. We don’t drink much at home, you see.’


Clover and Alice exchanged glances. Unlike Sheila, they did see. And what they often saw was Ruby Lewis teetering around,
vodka in hand, laughing, dancing, wrapping herself round some gawky boy. Ruby, at thirteen, had been the first of the Crew
to get drunk-sick. The reason she passed out after a couple of glasses of wine was probably because she’d drunk a couple of
bottles beforehand.


But how could you tell another parent that their daughter was drinking too much, probably smoking dope and maybe even sleeping
around?


After an uneasy hello in Alice’s direction Sheila and Nigel formed a tight knot with George and two other parents from their
church. Laura trotted round the marquee, kissing everyone. ‘You’re so clever,’ Clover heard her say. ‘What gorgeous shoes.’
‘Didn’t you think the headmaster’s speech was wonderful?’ ‘Yes, Jamie’s going to do law at Leeds. We’re looking into internships
for him.’


‘Laura is such a people-pleaser,’ observed Alice. She occasionally had flashes of malice.

‘She’s just nice.’ Clover often found herself defending one friend to the other. There was a certain rivalry between Alice
and Laura. Or maybe it was resentment? It was something that chilled the air, anyway. Laura kept a very beady eye out when
Alice leaned into Tim, talking about returns, and customer profiles, and ‘bounce’. But it might just have been the age-old
animosity between Alice, the archetypal working mother, with her taxi account and cleaning lady, and Laura, the stay-at-home mum who spent half her life ferrying her own and other people’s children about. Clover enjoyed her middle
ground, working as an assistant art teacher at the junior school three days a week. It meant she belonged in both camps, although
she suspected that that was cheating.


‘So who else are we expecting?’ asked Alice, surveying the crowd over her glass.

‘The Baxters and the Marchandanis. And there’s a spare man, Duncan Hesketh. His son, Joe, joined in Sixth Form and got friendly
with the rest of the Crew. Look, there’s Duncan.’


A rangy, muscular man with a shock of pepper-and-salt hair appeared at the entrance to the marquee, peering over the tops
of people’s heads, looking bemused. Clover waved. ‘That’s Duncan.’


‘He looks like Diesel,’ commented Alice, adding: ‘You know, your dog.’

‘What, a cross between a greyhound and a Brillo pad?’ But Clover could see what Alice meant.

‘Clover,’ he said, ambling over and kissing her on the cheek. ‘I didn’t think I’d find you in this crowd.’

Clover ran through the introductions, pulling George back into the group: ‘This is George, my husband. And Tim. He and Laura,
who is busy charming everyone in the marquee, are Jamie’s parents, and Tim’s a conservation architect. Nigel and Sheila are
Ruby’s parents. Nigel works for Packpac and Sheila does amazing volunteering at the charity shop on King’s Mile.’


Duncan smiled and shook hands all round. ‘I hope you’re not going to test me later. I might have trouble remembering all that.’

‘And this is Alice, Lola’s mother.’ Clover suddenly realised that Duncan probably had no idea who their children were. The labels that had defined them all for so long were suddenly redundant.


As Clover added that Alice was also MD of Shirts & Things Alice extended a slender hand, be-ringed and braceleted in Indian
silver. Assessing Duncan with a half-amused look, she added, ‘As we’re going for full job descriptions, I might add that Clover
is too modest to tell you t. . .