The Great Allotment Proposal. Jenny Oliver

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.

      But Jack didn’t want to stay. He didn’t want to be his dad. In fact it was his dad who had driven him into the desire to leave, to do something else, to not be hovering on his phone at midnight, flying off to the States at moment’s notice, leaving the kids with the nanny or in front of the TV while he calmed some needy rock and roll star.

      Emily started to get nervous.

      Jack told her it would be fine. But Emily had lived her whole life being shipped from pillar to post, she had seen what happened when tempers frayed, when people were held in the palms of others, their choices stifled. She had seen her mother backed into a corner enough times, her power cut in an instant by her reliance on the money of the men she married. How in a fit of frustrated fury she would pack them all up and they would be gone. Or just as easily, and as often, someone else would pack their bags and throw them out.

      Jack couldn’t bear being at the mercy of his father. You could see it in the wild dart of his eyes as they tried to lie outside in the heat, pretending it was as it was before. But sweat that had seemed slick was now sticky, irritating, too hot, too close.

      And then it all happened at once. A chain of motion. Like a pinball machine in little French cafes.

      Jack’s dad pulled the plug on his finances. But instead of making him stay, it pushed Jack to find other means of studying. Which he found in the deepest, hottest part of the Spanish desert. Where they grew tomatoes in polytunnels and filmed Wild West movies. An eco research centre where he would learn sustainable engineering.

      It would be OK. It was only for a year. There was no internet and limited phone contact, but it would be OK.

      Alan raged.

      The weather changed. The sky grew clouds that turned grey overnight and it rained as incessantly as the sun had beaten down. The grass went green.

      And Jack left.

      ‘Of course I want you to wait for me. But I understand that for both of us it’s a big ask. So let’s take it a day at a time. Let what will be, be.’ They were not the parting words that Emily wanted to hear.

      But she didn’t have to dwell on them for long, because three days after Jack left, Bernard died.

      Back on the boat, Jack clicked his fingers and said, ‘Emily, what are you thinking about?’

      She shook her head, surprised to find that she’d just been sitting reminiscing in a trance. ‘Nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything.’

      ‘Yeah, right,’ he scoffed. ‘It didn’t look like nothing.’

      She rested her fork on the side of her bowl and leant forward, her elbows resting on the table, her palm supporting her chin and said, ‘I was thinking about how hot it was. That summer. How just unbelievably hot it was.’

      Jack swallowed and put his fork down as well, crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his chair back against the cupboard. ‘Yeah. It was hot.’

      ‘You think the heat made a difference? Like we’ve never talked about it, have we? This is probably the first time we’ve seen each other.’ She narrowed her eyes, thinking, then said, ‘It is the first time we’ve seen each other, isn’t it? God that’s weird.’

      Jack got up and started to make coffee in a little silver percolator that sat on the hob. ‘I saw you nearly every time I went to buy a paper. Staring down from a magazine. Your life, Em, it’s hectic. Chaos.’

      She frowned. ‘It’s not chaos. It isn’t.’ She shook her head when he raised a brow in disbelief. ‘It has been, like I certainly did some stupid things that I’m not necessarily proud of but it’s bloody hard to suddenly be thrust into the limelight and have no idea how to handle it. Seriously, don’t look at me like that. I’d like to see how you would have handled it. You can’t throw them all in the river, you know.’ She smiled and took the little cup of coffee that he had poured while she was talking. ‘Thanks, by the way, for today. Possibly could have walked him out the gate, but thanks anyway.’

      Jack just tipped his head in acceptance, didn’t say anything.

      ‘Honestly, you’ve got to believe me when I say that it’s not the way my life is now. Not always, anyway. I was really young and at sea, then. Especially after Giles…’

      They both sort of flinched when she said his name and so she carried on really quickly, trying to get to her point rather than dwell on her ex-fiancé. ‘I was suddenly free and rich and had too many people that I trusted as my friends. And, unfortunately, all that is captured on camera for the world to see, for ever.’ She gave a small laugh and then drained her espresso. ‘Let’s go outside and have a brandy or something. This is too deep. Have you got any brandy?’

      Jack nodded. He drank a sip of coffee and chucked the rest in the sink, then took a bottle of brandy off the top shelf, hooked two small green glasses between his fingers and as he started to walk outside, beckoned for her to go ahead of him.