1925–2018
On the inside page was an oval sepia photograph of a handsome but rather arrogant-looking young airman, with a supercilious half-smile playing about his lips, the legend beneath, ‘Gordon “Spider” Naylor semper fidelis.’
I didn’t have the courage to admit to Nick that I’d thought it was Jean who was dead. Clearly I had been told, and if I’d been too far gone at the time to digest the information, I was not inclined to cite my illness in mitigation. This was supposed to be the new me, the strong me, the sane me. Besides, it would have felt unseemly, for Jean was standing, large as life, just feet away from me, her dress smart, her posture erect, her hair neatly coiffed beneath a half-veiled pill-box hat. Given the scale of the transformation she appeared to have undergone since the last time I’d seen her, distressed and vulnerable on the lane, I felt I could be forgiven for not having recognized her.
‘… And this is my son Peter,’ she was saying to Douglas Gaines. ‘Come over special from Dubai.’
Nick was worried the wake would tire me out, but I was determined to go. I wanted to express my – condolences would be the wrong word – sympathies, I suppose, euphemistic enough to cover it. I also wanted to lay the ghost of Prospect Cottage once and for all to rest. I needed to satisfy myself that it was not the ghoulish mausoleum of my imaginings, but, as Nick had always insisted, a dreary little house blighted by nothing more sinister than a coal-effect gas fire and some flock wallpaper.
In fact, for the home of two reclusive pensioners tricked out for a wake, it had a surprisingly jaunty air about it. The curtains were now half-open, one window stood ajar and some ugly yellow chrysanthemums on the ledge had attracted the attention of a late, lazy wasp. The small front parlour was crammed with furniture – two wing-backed armchairs stood either side of the fireplace, a glass-fronted china cabinet took up one alcove and a TV the other, whilst the only free wall was dominated by a bulky sideboard, covered in crocheted doilies and laden with enough sandwiches and sausage rolls to feed an army. Recalling Gordon’s abstemiousness on the night of our party, I was surprised to see a cluster of tumblers and an array of hard liquor on offer as well.
I watched Nick work the room – clasping shoulders, shaking hands, pitching his comments perfectly between sombreness and cheer while I hovered awkwardly by the refreshments. I was still trying to take in the scale of my misapprehension about the funeral.
‘Excuse me, love, you couldn’t top me up, could you?’
It was the plump woman from the church, still wearing her navy coat and looking as much a fish out of water as me. I obliged and she tilted her sherry glass towards me with a wary smile.
‘Cheers,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘I’m Pat, by the way. The daughter, for my sins…’
‘Karen,’ I said, offering her my hand, ‘I live just up the lane. I’m sorry for your loss.’
She gave me a slightly pained smile and I recalled my conversation with Jean at our housewarming: ‘she and Gordon don’t see eye to eye’. Something of an understatement, judging by the unease this poor woman clearly felt in what had been her childhood home.
‘Your mum seems to be coping well,’ I ventured. We both looked across to where Jean was sitting in a high-backed chair, chatting animatedly to the vicar, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.
Pat gave me a look as if to say, ‘Well wouldn’t you?’ But I didn’t dare let on how much I knew – as objectionable an old tyrant as Gordon had been, I was conscious I was still at his wake.
‘I suppose… she… her… circumstances will change now…’ I added, delicately. ‘It’s a lot of house to deal with on her own.’
The knots in which English people will tie themselves, to avoid saying the obvious: your mother is old and frail. What are you going to do about it?
But Pat didn’t turn a hair.
‘She’ll not want to budge from here,’ she said. ‘Believe you me, I’ve tried.’
‘So what will… happen then?’
But Jean had tired of making small talk with the vicar and was making her way over to us. Perhaps she had risen to the occasion, perhaps she just brushed up well, but she seemed much more the woman I had first encountered – erect and beady, than the one Nick and I had found wandering unhinged and vulnerable that night on the lane.
‘I see you’ve met our Pat,’ she said, giving me what seemed a smile of recognition. ‘Pat, this is… no, don’t tell me…’ She clasped my hand to silence me and I held my breath.
‘… Karen. She and her husband bought the Marsdens’ old place two doors along. You remember the Marsdens, Pat?’
I could have punched the air. Not only did Jean remember who I was, she was a person again, cogent and engaged.
‘Yes, Mother, I remember the Marsdens,’ said Pat tolerantly, then turning to me in an undertone. ‘What did you pay for it, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Oh gosh, I’m afraid I don’t… my husband dealt with all that… why are you…? Is your mother thinking of selling…?’
‘No, I am not!’ Jean interjected in an indignant tone. There was nothing much wrong with her hearing either, it seemed.
‘Well now, Mum, let’s see how you go,’ Pat said. ‘I’ve a lot on my plate. I’ll be over when I can but I’ll not be able to drop everything if you fall and hurt yourself again.’
‘You cheeky wotnot!’ Jean said, mock indignation scarcely concealing her obvious delight that Pat would once again be back in her life, in however limited a capacity.
‘There are all sorts of modifications you can make, anyway,’ I said brightly. ‘Walk-in showers and stair-lifts and so forth.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ Jean said a little huffily and I felt myself blushing. ‘I shan’t be rushing into anything and besides…’
She looked over at the chimneybreast, where a framed wedding photo of her and Gordon took pride of place and for a horrible moment I thought she was about to wax lyrical about the home they had shared together.
‘My top priority will be getting rid of that horrible wallpaper.’
30
‘Well, that was fucking grim,’ Nick said. ‘I tell you what, when my time comes, I want you all to have a bloody big party. Hire a DJ, get rat-arsed and let your hair down.’
‘What makes you think I’ll be there to organize it?’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ll outlive me for sure,’ Nick said. ‘What with my lousy genes and my misspent youth, I’ll be lucky to see sixty-five. You did brilliantly, by the way,’ he added, turning my face towards him and bestowing a kiss on my forehead.
‘It was a funeral, not a school play,’ I said, taking off my coat and tossing it over the back of the sofa.
‘She put a brave face on it, didn’t she? The Old Dear.’
‘I’m not sure she needed to…’
Nick gave me a funny look.
‘What, you think she’s glad…?’
He looked faintly shocked and I thought, were you there, that night? When she had to be manhandled back through her own front door? When she flinched from her husband’s touch as if he were her jailor? Did that look like a happy marriage to you?
‘Well, I think there might have been an element of…’ remembering that Gordon was still warm in the ground, I deployed all the tact I could muster, ‘relief on her part.’
‘Christ,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Bleak.’
I looked at him then and it struck me how unobservant he had always been about other people and their relationships – bit-players, as they were, in the drama of his life.
‘Well,’ I said with a shrug, ‘relationships are tough, aren’t they? Christ, you of all people should know that…’
He looked bewildered, as though the fact he had one failed marriage and a string of infidelities under his belt had enlightened him not one whit.
I watched him scoop my coat fastidiously off the back of the sofa and hang it on the hook next to his. He undid the top button
of his shirt, loosened his tie, ran his fingers through his hair – just as he used to do every night when he got home from work, oblivious to the aphrodisiac effect it had on me. Used to have.
He saw me watching him and tilted his head on one side indulgently.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘wake up call for me. Our marriage is my top priority now.’
‘Right, well,’ I said briskly, ‘my top priority’s a cup of tea. I’m spitting feathers here.’
‘I’ll get it…’ he said. ‘You take the weight off your—’
‘Nick!’ I snapped. ‘I think I can make a cup of tea.’
I marched into the kitchen, filled the kettle noisily and put it on the stove, then scooped the used teabags out of the pot and rinsed it out under the mixer tap, the faintly rust-tinged water reminding me, with a shudder, of the trace of fox blood I had washed away that first night. Had it really only been six months ago?
I glanced over my shoulder. Nick was leaning against the doorjamb, regarding me thoughtfully; hands in his pockets.
‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
My first thought was Imogen. He’d slept with her. I waited for the trapdoor to open beneath me but I felt… nothing. No, not nothing… I felt a little lift, a sense of possibility, a chink of light.
‘So… when you were in hospital,’ he continued, ‘and I was sitting around looking at you, at your lovely face and realizing how lucky I am to have you and what a fucking prick I’ve been…’
‘Yes…’ I said warily. I would need to make this look good.
‘Well, your phone kept going off…’
I frowned. It was only then it dawned on me that he was confessing some other misdemeanour altogether. I thought of the buzzing I had heard coming from my holdall on the return journey from the hospital, the three missed calls I had not yet got round to checking.
‘And…?’ I said.
‘… And, well, I suppose I thought, if someone’s this keen to get hold of you, I’d maybe better… have a listen…’
‘Right.’
‘… Which I know is an invasion of your privacy and not my place, yadda yadda, but I figured, under the circumstances… Anyway, it was this gallery in Mayfair…’
As soon as he said it, it was as though I had always known it. Those low atonal buzzes coming from my holdall on the back seat had been my future calling me.
He gave me his jokey hangdog look and I realized that it was impossible for him to conceive of a predicament which he couldn’t either charm his way out of, or somehow turn to his own advantage.
‘You’re not mad at me, are you?’
I kept my voice matter-of-fact. ‘What did they say?’
‘Well, it was a bit hard to follow, but essentially this guy, Tom Hayden-something or other knew your work from before and he’d bumped into someone from round here at a private view, and whoever it was, was bigging up your new project. My money’s on Luca…’
‘It won’t be Luca,’ I said with a bitter laugh.
‘Well, whoever it was, this geezer – super posh, terribly RP, wants to set up a meeting with your people…’ he sketched inverted commas humorously in the air, ‘with a view to maybe giving you a show.’
‘Ha,’ I said, ‘wait till he finds out I don’t have any people.’
‘Ah…’ said Nick looking at me significantly, ‘but you do!’
I smiled at him, but my heart was sinking.
‘It’s a no-brainer!’ Nick said. ‘Your work’s in demand, I’m stepping back from mine. You need time and space to get on with your new project, I need a little enterprise to keep me out of trouble…’
He came up to me then and looped his arms around my waist, pushing his cheek insistently against mine, as certain as ever of his power to endear, to prevail.
‘Look at us!’ he said, indicating our shadowy twins, reflected in the dusk-darkened windows behind the sink. ‘We’ve got it all now. You’ve got your studio and your talent and with a bit of a leg up from Tom Doo-Dah Whatsit, a lucrative future ahead of you. We’ve got this place. We’ve got a community. But more than anything else,’ he leaned his head against mine so that our two reflections became one, ‘we’ve got each other.’
In the dusk-darkened glass, my smile could almost have been mistaken for the real thing.
We took the tea up to bed and sipped it, side by side, like two old fogeys and then Nick snuggled down, his palms clasped tightly around my upper arm, his limpet lips only relaxing away from my flesh as sleep took hold. I sat propped against the pillows in our exquisite little bedroom, with its rustic charm and its imaginative storage solutions, and watched the achingly tasteful linen blind turn slowly from grey, to charcoal, to black.
When I woke the blind was grey again and just discernible against the darker recess of the window frame. I hadn’t set an alarm. I hadn’t needed to. I lifted the duvet up as gingerly as if it were rigged with explosives, but Nick didn’t stir, just lay spread-eagled on his back, his chest rising and falling in the deep untroubled sleep of one who has made his accommodation with the world. I took my phone off the bedside table, gathered yesterday’s clothes off the chair in the corner of the room and slipped outside to put them on. Tiptoeing downstairs, I instinctively avoided the one creaky stair and, moving through the living room like a ghost, collected my handbag from beside the sofa and my car keys from the window ledge.
I pulled the door of the Renault shut as quietly as I could, put on my seatbelt and let out the hand brake, grateful for the slight decline on the lane that meant I didn’t have to start the ignition right outside the cottage. Coasting down the hill, I let the car drift to a standstill by itself and was about to start the engine when I was struck by the silence and stillness in the little hollow. I sat for a moment, taking in the scene for the last time. The hedgerow, thick with Old Man’s Beard, seemed to glow in the dawn light beneath it clumps of nettles rose like spires. I started in shock as two bright animal eyes locked on mine through the mist. I shuddered and looked away, remembering the sickening thud as I had swung round this same bend heading into the hamlet all those months ago. Was this a haunting? Some fox ancestor, come back to jinx my departure as its forebear had jinxed my arrival? I looked again, half expecting the apparition to have gone, but it was still there, its pupils beady and unblinking. And then the creature sprang out onto the road and it was no fox but a young doe, body all angles, tail erect, torso steaming in the chill dawn. She stood there for a second, regarding me, head cocked and I sat mesmerized. Holding my breath, I turned the key in the ignition, but at the first stutter of the engine, she skittered off up the lane. I followed her for a few yards, keeping my distance. She glanced back once, as if in valediction, and then with a flick of her hind legs veered off up the bank and was gone.
The sun was up by the time I reached the junction. I held the car on the hand brake and took one last look down the valley. I had never felt so calm and resolute, so unburdened by doubt. I let the brake out and the engine roared as I pulled out into the empty road and headed for London.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the following people:
For their encouragement, invaluable editorial input, kindness and enthusiasm, my agent Sallyanne Sweeney and editor Kate Mills.
For their inspiration and constructive criticism, members, past and present of The Little George Writers’ Group and Stroud Writers’ Circle.
For their patience and attention to detail as first readers, Julie Bull, Polly Jameson, Petrina Dorrington, Martha Everett and Thea Everett.
Above all, for his unstinting love and support as well as for truly constructive and tactful criticism, and for helping me see the wood for the trees, Adam Goulcher.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.
com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, ON, M5H 4E3, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India
http://www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
The Move Page 25
