Jenny Oliver - The Great Allotment Proposal

‘Would have been easier to come round the side,’ a voice said.

‘Please don’t ruin my moment,’ Emily replied, holding a hand up to stop them saying more as she let the evening sun flicker on her face.

Jack laughed, ‘Sorry.’

Emily opened her eyes and looked at the bright fishing boat in front of her. Moored to her jetty that should have been neglected and decrepit but which had been mended, the broken posts re-carved, the white paint gleaming. The boat itself was like a mini-trawler painted various shades of turquoise and cobalt blue; bright-red buoys hung from the sides. Around the edge was a white stripe and on it at the front, written in black, was the name, That Jack Built. The cabin in the centre had been extended almost the full length of the boat and the mast had a white flag that flapped in the gentle breeze.

‘Nice boat,’ she said, shielding her eyes as she looked up to where he sat, his feet resting on the rail, slicing an apple with his penknife.

‘Thanks,’ he said, glancing up at her without lifting his head. ‘I like it.’

‘Are you going to invite me on board?’ she asked, head tilted to one side, watching him.

Jack paused mid-slice, then leant forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Em, if you wanna come aboard, you come aboard.’

She felt her face smile as she watched him, all mellow nonchalance and laid-back cool.

He glanced up again. ‘Are you just going to stand there?’

‘No.’ She shook her head, a smile still playing on her lips. ‘No, I’m coming on board.’

As Jack stood to give her a hand up she felt his palm, all rough with blisters and hard skin. When she was on deck, instead of letting go, she held onto his wrist with her other hand and turned his over so she could see all the marks. ‘Are you bare-knuckle fighting or something?’

‘Would it turn you on if I was?’

Emily raised a brow.

Jack chuckled. ‘It’s the nature of the job.’

Emily let his hand go and walked around to the front of the boat, letting her fingers trail on the railing. ‘And what is that exactly? I thought you went off to become an engineer.’

‘I am an engineer. I’m also a carpenter. And a boatbuilder.’

She leant facing him with both hands on the railing behind her. ‘You built this?’ she asked, nodding towards the main cabin of the boat.

Jack nodded.

‘Impressive,’ she said.

‘What are you doing here, Emily?’

She shook her head. ‘I took a walk and this is where I ended up.’

Jack narrowed his eyes like he was debating whether to invite her in or send her home. Emily raised a brow back at him, almost in challenge.

‘You want some dinner?’ he said in the end.

‘OK.’

Chapter Six

The kitchen was tiny. The table even smaller. Emily sat with a glass of wine watching Jack cook. Throwing together the finest, simplest ingredients – tearing leaves from beautiful lush pots of fresh herbs on the window sill, slicing big juicy Spanish tomatoes, crushing plump smoked garlic and ripping up soft white mozzarella. She wondered where he’d learnt all these skills. He hadn’t been able to cook when she’d known him. Nor, for that matter, could he have built a boat. Not one as stunning as this one. The interior was all chestnut-coloured glossy wood, a worn bench ran along one side of cabin opposite a scuffed black furnace, plain white curtains rippled in the slight breeze and at the end of the room a soft tartan rug had been thrown over a big, high bed. Next to them in the kitchen there was an old worn Peruvian rug on the floor, a bunch of cushions scattered against the wall and a large window that opened up to look out on the river.

‘I really like your boat,’ she said.

Jack laughed as if her saying it was ridiculous.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘What are you doing here, Emily?’

‘Being my usual amazing self.’

Jack raised a brow.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I liked the idea of seeing you, I suppose.’

He narrowed his eyes at her as if assessing her motives.

She bit her lip and half-smiled, ‘Why don’t you believe me?’

‘Because my life is really simple now,’ he said, looking down to stir the saucepan full of rich tomatoey spaghetti. There was a tiny half-smile on his face, but she got the impression that he wanted to close his eyes and make her disappear.

‘I won’t make it complicated.’ Emily nudged his calf with her toe. ‘I promise.’

‘You make everything complicated,’ he said with a laugh and then waved a hand as if they should say no more. ‘OK, well here, have some pasta. You need more wine?’

She nodded and he topped up her glass with a smoky bordeaux that reminded her of sitting by the wood fire in her mum’s house in France. Then she picked up her fork and twirled up some spaghetti. The moment it hit her tastebuds, all the fancy canapés she’d eaten that night paled into insignificance. ‘How come you can cook like this?’

Jack sat back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other ankle to knee; he had the bowl of pasta in one hand and was twisting spaghetti with the other. ‘I learnt while I was in Spain.’

Emily made a face. ‘At that commune? I thought you were building stuff not cooking.’

He shook his head. ‘We had to do everything, it was totally self-sufficient. And it wasn’t a commune, it was a research centre.’

‘Yeah, but it was all hippy-dippy eco, wasn’t it?’

He winced. ‘No, Em, it was a research centre. We worked on creating sustainable engineering projects. It just happens to be self-sufficient and off-grid. So yes, you learn how to cook.’ He held up his bowl as if to show that that was how he had learnt to make such good pasta.

‘You did pretty well considering you were only there for a year. It sounds like my worst nightmare.’ Emily shuddered before putting a big forkful of pasta into her mouth.

Jack paused. ‘I wasn’t there for a year, Em,’ he said. ‘I was there for seven years.’

Emily frowned. She had too much pasta in her mouth to say anything so instead she just watched him as he carried on eating, not looking at her.

The summer of the Cherry Pie Island Festival was the hottest anyone had known. It had been too hot to do anything other than lie in the shade as the bees bumped lazily from flower to flower and dogs moaned. Occasionally they would roll themselves from the shade into the pool with a splash. It was the type of heat that you couldn’t fight so it was easier to give in. She and Jack would sprawl in a tangle of golden limbs, dreaming of a future as easy and uncomplicated as their humid, sticky days.

They both knew the future was ticking closer, but that only meant Jack at uni in London, home some weekends, and Emily, whose TV drama had been commissioned for another eight episodes, would carry on back and forth to Three Mills studios. It was perfect. There was nothing to keep them apart. They lay in bliss, eating fat, juicy cherries content in the future they had mapped to perfection.

The weather got hotter. The hosepipes were banned and the grass turned yellow and the flowers withered. The dog cried at night as the thick heat swamped them in their beds. The fans droned. There was no escape.

And then the arguments started between Jack and his dad. A workaholic driven by mountains of success, Alan Neil wanted Jack behind him in the business. Wanted it to pass down within the family. He’d niggled and pushed but now as the time came for Jack to go and the heat tapped incessantly, spiralling normal conversations into ferocious bickering, he started to question why he was going. His maths wasn’t good enough for engineering, they all knew it; he wouldn’t last the uni course. Alan was humouring him by letting him go; he’d struggle and he wasn’t the type to really knuckle down. If he didn’t get through the maths, then the whole thing was pointless. A waste of money. A waste of Alan’s money. Better to stay.