Growing Season

By Seni Glaister

‘Extremely charming’ Marian Keyes on Mr Doubler Begins Again

When life gets tough, do you give up? Or do you grow up?

Danny is riddled with anxiety. But he wants to be strong for his wife Sam. She’s been through so much already.

If only he had someone to talk to.

Sam is facing a very different future to the one she expected. She’s ready to move on, yet other people won’t let her.

If only she had someone to talk to.

Their new neighbour Diana is hiding from her past. She wanted a new life. Now she’s got it she feels angry and alone.

If only she had someone to talk to.

Each of them is hiding their pain. Each of them needs to heal. But only when they learn to let each other in will they finally be able to grow.

What readers are saying about Growing Season

‘A beautifully written novel, with highs, lows and twists along the way.’ Karen and Her Books

‘This was one of those cosy, emotive and just all round beautiful reads that come up once in a while and just really grab my heart. I loved every moment’ my.bookworm.life

‘Glaister's descriptions and depictions of nature are beautiful throughout. But the way she intertwines humanity with nature is particularly remarkable.’ Netgalley reviewer

‘This book is so uplifting and beautiful… the feel good quality of the story really left its mark.’ Jera’s Jamboree

‘Most definitely what I needed at the moment – something uplifting, joyful, fresh, full of life!’ Netgalley reviewer

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008285043

Seni Glaister

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.

Book preview

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 intriguing 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 times. 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.

Outside, the barn owl, quiet now, alighted softly on a branch to take vigil. The night was clear and dry so she’d soon leave her watch-post to repeat her ghostlike rounds, her soft fringed feathers making no sound in the dark night air. Watchful, she waited, alert to the dangers around her, while all about her the unknowing creatures dropped their guard.

Chapter 2

Long after Sam had fallen asleep, Danny realised he was fully awake, unsure if he had slept or not.

It was 4 a.m. and it was still dark, and it would be dark for a while. Danny needed to pee. He lay in bed arguing with himself. If, he wondered, he gave in to his bladder’s demands now, would he be making a rod for his own back? Would he become a slave to his bodily functions, destined to never make it through the night without a bathroom visit? On the other hand, he reasoned, if he ignored the urgent pressure then perhaps he might give himself a whole different set of problems. Perhaps he’d stretch his bladder or cause some sort of infection. His wife had certainly suffered from those, but he wasn’t sure if men his age could get them too. But if it didn’t lead to an infection, might it lead to something much worse? How did cancers in that area begin? He knew that bladder cancers were more common in men than in women. Perhaps not relieving yourself might be causal? He sighed, a little disappointed in himself for allowing the argument to escalate so quickly and with almost no opposing defence deployed by the reasonable bit of his brain. Getting up as quietly as he could, he padded through the darkness to the bathroom.

He still wasn’t used to the house. It was so much bigger than their London flat, which he’d loved. It had been his bachelor pad for a few years before Sam had moved in. Not that he’d been that sort of bachelor. It wasn’t as if he were entertaining a whole host of women in there. But the flat had been his and he’d been proud of buying his first property while still in his twenties, something he’d achieved quite independently of the inheritance that had then accelerated the move to Broome Cottage. There was no doubt that marrying Sam and sharing his flat with her had been the best thing he had ever done. She was there, every night, in touching distance and he would never tire of watching her sleep or waking up to her next to him. But her approach to domesticity was more chaotic than his own. She had arrived with very little, but clutter seemed to be attracted to her, following her home uninvited and finding space amongst his own ordered possessions. She never got around to explaining the purpose of the things that appeared on shelves or, increasingly, on every available surface, but they gave her such pleasure that he taught himself ways of coping, largely by seeing if he could notice a new item before it had formally been introduced to him. He would memorise the precise layout of each room as he left and scan it against his mental register on his return, discerning what was new, what was no longer there, what had moved. Eventually, when space became an issue and he could no longer see his apartment for her curious baubles, he realised he needed a longer-term coping mechanism. He advanced his plan to buy a larger house.

Turning on the light, he nodded in approval. This new bathroom was well-finished. The house was old – hundreds of years old according to Sam, but it had been fully renovated before being listed on the market. The kitchen was brand new and fitted, carpets had been laid throughout and both the upstairs bathroom and downstairs cloakroom featured good quality fittings. These were in an old-fashioned style, Victorian he thought, and they looked classy. More importantly, the taps worked and didn’t drip, the shower (which Sam had upgraded before he arrived) was powerful and the heated towel rails were piping hot. It was a good bathroom. He was proud to own it. But he still wasn’t used to it.

He turned the main light off and flicked the light on above the mirror, scrutinising his face. He was tired; the skin under his eyes sagged a little. He peered in closer and examined a couple of very thin lines on the side of his nose, trying to establish if they were broken veins. When did that begin to happen, he wondered, surely not in his thirties? He was technically a young man still, wasn’t he? He pushed his hair back and looked at his hairline. That had definitely been creeping a little bit, there was certainly more forehead than he remembered. But he wore his hair quite long and it flopped forward so nobody was going to notice until there had been very much more retreat. He felt the top and back of his head, but it was ridiculous to try to ascertain if there was less hair there. Could he ask Sam? No, perhaps not. It was probably best if he didn’t draw attention to his slow decline. She was so vibrant and luminous. Her skin had an elasticity that suggested she would never be diminished by something as mundane as aging and he didn’t want to highlight her obvious superiority, in case it somehow weakened him in her eyes.

Danny knew he didn’t sleep enough, and it was beginning to show in his face. It needn’t impact on his career prospects – premature aging was a positive attribute in his line of work. Most of the successful partners could be mistaken for men ten years their senior. It wore you out, the constant counting and watching your back.

However, Danny was aware that long term sleep deprivation could impact on your physical heath and those were things that Danny needed to guard against. He knew that fatigue could be a symptom of cancer, but could it also be a cause? Poor sleep made you at risk to all sorts of diseases, he was sure, so it seemed very likely that cancer was one of them. Whether or not his bad habits were carcinogenic, he knew that there had been all sorts of studies that linked a lack of sleep with a poor outcome in life and Danny’s rational brain knew he needed to get a grip and tackle his insomnia. His irrational one, however, conspired quite forcibly to keep him awake.

Danny turned the light off and his sombre reflection in the moonlight looked just as terrifying as his yellowed face had under the glare of the bathroom light. Now, the dim shadows picked out his skeletal frame, peeling back the flesh and revealing the gaunt core of him. He looked like his father just before he died. He and his reflection stared at each other, and Danny wondered if his path was already inalterable.

Chapter 3

Now that Danny had also moved in to Broome Cottage Sam found herself having to adjust once again to a new persona altogether: that of a wife of a man who commuted, a man who departed early in the morning, taking the car and leaving her and her house entirely reliant on each other for company.

As she watched the rear lights of the car disappear down the drive, the red orbs losing their definition as they became consumed by the morning mist, she felt a pang of guilt. Danny now had to leave home two hours earlier to arrive at work at the same time, and all so he could enjoy the many benefits of countryside living she had promised him. In reality, it was unlikely he’d enjoy the house in daylight until early summer and even then, though she’d promised barbecues and stargazing, evening strolls and late-night cocktails, she knew he’d only really feel the benefit of country living at the weekends.

She glanced at the kitchen clock. It wouldn’t be light for another hour or so, and this sixty-minute pause stretched ahead of her like a yawn. Where Danny’s day had been shortened, her own days were now unfathomably long, and since she no longer had a job dictating how she spent her day, the many different things she could do with her time were overwhelming.

Sam thought fleetingly about the career she’d left behind in London. She missed it. She missed the dizzying forward momentum that came with a full workload and the sense of belonging that came with a shared purpose. But she didn’t miss the way it made her feel towards the end: the side glances and pity, the laughter that stopped when she walked in the room, the sense of rejection that came with being suddenly, unalterably different.

She shrugged away the flood of regret. This was better: small manual tasks that required no input from anyone else, jobs she could complete that made each day a little bit better than the last. These were the things that might make her feel whole again.

She climbed upstairs, her bare feet enjoying the carpeted treads. She had been busy at Broome Cottage since the removal vans had first arrived, finding a place for everything and ensuring the house achieved that fine balance of looking both lived in and orderly. She now admired her work but felt a little saddened by the way their entire London life had been so neatly absorbed by the spacious cupboards and plentiful shelves she now had at her disposal. In London, their small apartment had been bursting at the seams and her life had felt both interesting and complex. Books were piled on every available surface and vases weren’t allowed to exist as empty vessels, they’d been stacked or filled with other small items. Here, everything had a place yet their combined possessions left the house looking hungry for more.

She wandered into the smallest of the three bedrooms, which sat immediately at the top of the stairs. This room was positioned neatly between the master bedroom with its en suite bathroom to the left and the guest bedroom and family bathroom to the right. Though small, it was a nicely proportioned, airy bedroom and was perfectly positioned for a number of purposes. It would be impossible to escape the notice of any prospective buyer that it was within hearing distance of the master bedroom and next to the bathroom, making it ideal for anyone with their heart set on a bigger family.

Sam sat at the desk and opened and closed the empty central drawer absent-mindedly. The furniture was well made and the mechanism was of good quality and the drawer slid open and closed silently in a most satisfying way. Next to the desk was a heavy filing cabinet, made of light oak, its pair of matching keys, guarded for transit with a bit of blue tape, still hung together from the top lock. The filing cabinet was solid and perhaps designed for bigger lives than theirs, but she could imagine filling up the drawers over time, watching the files become designated by her tightly printed capital letters, spelling out the nooks and crannies of a future that could not yet be named or anticipated.

When unpacking the huge delivery boxes, she had simply put the box files from their London flat into the top drawer of the filing-cabinet, but she realised now that sorting these more definitively was a job that would happily absorb an hour before she left the house for an exploratory walk. Sam had resolved to make walking part of every day and idly wondered whether Danny might ever soften on his determination not to get a dog.

Warily, Sam eyed her laptop, which sat on the top of the desk. She had paused when she had come to pack it, and she wished she’d had the courage to leave it behind her in London. Perhaps she could have thrown it melodramatically into the skip with all the other detritus that she didn’t want any part of anymore. Better still, she could have hurled it into the Thames as they’d crossed the bridge on their journey south. But the logical part of her brain had won, telling her that the physical laptop wasn’t the issue, it was merely a symbol, so she’d capitulated and brought it with her.

Ignoring the laptop, which seemed to glower from the desktop, silently insisting on attention, she resisted the urge to plug it in. Instead, she retrieved her own box file from the top drawer and began to sort the paperwork into separate piles on the grey carpet. Systematically, she shuffled the papers into the compartments of her life: one, the largest, for the letters, bills and documents that related to her health; one for receipts and guarantees; another for her driving licence, theory test and car documentation, a final pile for the paperwork associated with her academic career. This pile, the second largest, was surprising in its bulk considering she never felt she’d achieved anything much, but she’d kept her school reports for a number of years and she had her GCSE and A Level certificates in stiff card envelopes to protect them which added a little heft to the pile. Her degree was represented by a single certificate which seemed a rather flimsy portrayal of what was her greatest accomplishment to date. Sam had received a top degree from a respected university (not a top university, but one that usually won an impressed nod of approval whenever she mentioned it) and she’d worked very hard for her result. She’d eschewed the parties and club scene in favour of extra courses, and she’d worked diligently for three years, anxious not to waste the opportunity her parents had afforded her. And despite her admirable work ethic, she’d still had fun, met Danny, fallen in love and set herself on a course for life that seemed immutable now.

She looked up at the big cork notice board that had been fixed to the wall above the desk. From where she was sitting, its emptiness looked like longing. So far, the only embellishment she’d made to the board was a pinned strip of four identical pictures, showing herself and Danny squeezed