Exactly What You Mean by Ben Hinshaw

Author:Ben Hinshaw [Hinshaw, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241524749
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

7. The Hosepipe Ban

The first conversation with Flora took place over the garden fence. Later it would strike him as their only conversation, and later still he would come to believe that they had never really talked at all—at least, not properly, one adult to another. Which, of course, technically, she wasn’t at the time. But it might as well have been the other way around.

Saturday, early September. Roger sweated in shorts in the garden, reading The Times, using it to shield his face from the sun. He’d already discarded the day’s Guernsey Press, which lay beside his shaky deckchair. The boys were inside on the computer, Lucy busy unpacking another box. He had ten more minutes, he guessed, before she came out needing help. The sky was a flawless molten blue, no cloud in sight that might end the drought. Butterflies and bees called on stricken flowers at the edge of the khaki lawn.

That summer of ’89 had been the driest he’d known. The reservoir was almost empty—he’d driven by and witnessed the exposed banks and protruding reeds, frightened to see it so low. The next day, he’d gone back with Lucy and the boys to make sure they understood. They’d all been sharing bathwater for weeks, flushing no more than four times a day, but it didn’t feel like enough. The Marchioness dead still littered the national headlines, a week since it went down, and Roger tried to think about those rich kids in the Thames, about drowning in a summer so parched.

Instead he thought again about yesterday’s meeting. When called upon to speak, he had made a slip—‘Not a ginormous problem,’ he’d said—that caused him to twitch and sip from an empty water glass. It was one thing to pick this stuff up from the boys, another to repeat it in a stifling room full of colleagues senior and otherwise. And, of course, it would be ginormous. ‘Not a real word!’ he’d pointed out time and again, in the same voice he used to critique their enunciation. ‘A gnu is an animal, you animals. Now tell me again what you’re going to do.’

Thankfully, no one in the States of Guernsey accounting department seemed to care. Nobody, that is, but old Doug Le Huray, flabby and red-faced bowls enthusiast, who later that day shared with Roger his plan to barbecue a fish for tea. The fish in question, Doug pointedly said, was a ‘ginormous’ skate, hooked off the south coast by his son-in-law.

Good one, Doug. Watch out for bones—a man could choke. In his deckchair, Roger tried not to think about work, to focus instead on the interesting paper and the sun warming his bare, unmuscular chest. Sounds of laughter and rushing water began drifting over the fence. Was that a hosepipe? Surely not. He’d met the neighbours, or the parents at least—they’d knocked to say welcome the day of the move. Nice people, mid-forties. Though their house was ostensibly identical to this one, they’d done it up

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