‘I always thought you were a bit loony,’ Maggie says.
One of the things about Maggie, Amy remembers, is that the part of her brain where the faculty of restraint should reside is blank. She always said exactly what wandered into her head. This clearly remains the case. ‘We were all rather wild at the time so it’s no wonder,’ Amy quickly says.
‘It’s all a bit of a blur, to be honest. I was doing a lot of drugs.’
‘We all were, Julian,’ says David.
Another pause follows. Then Simon says: ‘Seymour was always so g-g-generous. It’s th-th-thanks to him I have an interest in C-C-Claret and an appreciation for the f-f-finer things in l-l-life…’
‘…and he had impeccable taste and panache,’ says Amy.
‘I never thought I’d find knowing how to plaster a wall useful but I have to say it’s come in handy,’ adds Maggie.
Everyone laughs. Though it feels forced, they are grateful for levity.
‘Oh, it was a magical time. I honestly thought we’d change the world. Seems a bit naïve now, silly even, doesn’t it?’ Amy looks around but no one catches her eye. ‘It was a tough period for me, when I was living there, and I sometimes think it saved me. My mother dying and Dad getting married again. I don’t know, being there in the garden, with the plants and animals, with you all. Looking back I can see it helped me recover. Does that sound weird?’
‘Only a bit,’ Maggie touches Amy’s arm. ‘I’d forgotten how fucked up your life was then. So Julian, what actually did for Seymour in the end?’
Julian rolls another cigarette. ‘He was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. Then last summer he got terribly ill. Miriam, that’s my wife, she looked after him with some help from the hospice nurses. He died in the farmhouse, it’s what he wanted. Might be hard to believe but Dad became more reclusive as he aged. Left London and started to work on different sorts of photography.’
He lights the cigarette. ‘Shall we carry on this conversation somewhere warmer? You’d probably like to see the cottage. Come back to Wyld Farm. I’ll call Miriam and tell her we’re on the way.’
‘Can someone give us a lift? Merry, David and I came by train,’ Maggie announces as though they should be impressed. ‘I always use public transport,’ she adds, getting into the Webster’s family estate.
‘I’ll ride with Julian,’ David calls from the dilapidated Jaguar. ‘He says to follow us if you’ve forgotten the way.’
And they do because they have.
The five of them had not met over the previous 25 years. Wyld Farm consumed (or destroyed) any interest they’d had for each other. Life took them in different directions. Their time together became a tale they might tell to amuse others, not something to be re-visited. Better left as a hippy dream, the more glorious perhaps for being ephemeral.
Chance brought Simon and Amy to the same party five years after they left Wyld Farm. At first they moaned about the way Seymour had treated them before grudgingly admitting that they might have been an annoying group of hedonists with idealistic undertones and questionable domestic habits. The more they reminisced, the more their Garden of Eden fantasy made them laugh. They often said it was a shared sense of humour that made them fall in love. When they invited Julian to their wedding, they did not receive a reply. Eighteen months later when Chloe was born, life and parenthood became too absorbing to paddle in rose-tinted nostalgia.
Curiosity calls them to Wyld Farm. The track to the farmhouse is still full of potholes. The cars bounce and squeak over the bumps. Green shoots dot the ploughed fields. The soil, the colour of bruised meat, is heavy with rain. The farmhouse appears through skeletal trees. A lighted window and smoke curling up from a chimney. A wooden gate now blocks the entrance to the yard. As David opens it, dogs race out to mill around his legs like spinning tops.
They park the vehicles. Over a bramble hedge stands the cottage of the same name. It’s a bizarre feeling to be back.
‘We lived in Bramble Cottage when we got married,’ Julian says. ‘But when Seymour got ill, we moved into the house, Miriam and Peter, our four-year-old son and me. Seymour couldn’t be on his own. You’ll get wet. Go inside and have a wander. It’s not locked.’
The hall is cramped. There’s a smell of cold and of wood-smoke. The sitting room where Amy spent so much time, high and happy, is gloomier than she recalled. The windows admit little light and even the few pieces of furniture make it feel cluttered. Signs of a family are evident: newspapers stacked under a table, children’s books, a toy train; they might just have left.
Up the narrow stairway is the bedroom Amy once shared with David. Did she paint the wall this soft green? The marble-topped washstand seems familiar. Is there evidence on these creaking floorboards that her bare toes trod here? Exposure of memory to reality reveals discrepancies but she cannot place where the errors lie.
Over the past years she has often thought about Wyld Farm. Sometimes she judges she had been thwarted by powerlessness. That’s too simple, she decides. There was hurt but there was healing too. A face she isn’t expecting to see stares back at her from the mirror. Cross-hatched lines furrow the skin around her eyes and her hair, once ash-blond is dull brown. Things are better out of focus, she decides folding away her glasses. She heads for the stairs.
Maggie is in the room she sometimes shared with Simon, the man with the affable manner who is stammering to her brother downstairs. What was it about him, the man in deck shoes and chinos that once had made her spirits sparkle? She had not always been happy here, that’s for sure, but at least she’d had choices. Unlike her life now. Her interest in pummelling English into the heads of students is dead.
‘I could do with a smoke.’ David says to Simon. ‘I suppose it’s being in this cottage, I associate it with good times. Join me?’
Simon is resisting the temptation to touch the crumbling plaster by the cooker. ‘Not p-p-part of my lifestyle now, thanks. I’m a management consultant, did I say? I suppose for you musicians it’s p-p-par for the course. Amy says you’re in a b-b-band? Anyway, we have to h-h-head homeward shortly; recalcitrant teenage girl to k-k-keep track of this evening.’
David does not mention he works as a designer for a packaging company that pays the bills and the child support. The band is his hobby. ‘Alright, next time we’re down here at our country cottage. What an incredible piece of luck, eh? Good old Seymour. This will be a perfect place to bring my son, get away from the city. He loves to kick a ball and there’s not much space where he lives with his mum. Amy, you want some of this?’
‘Thanks, I will,’ she giggles. She remembers how David used to make her stomach flip, especially when he played the guitar. Used to remind her of Jim Morrison.
His wife has not laughed like this for ages. Simon watches her reach into the cupboard, her dress pulling tight across her bottom. He feels a frisson of desire.
Triumphantly she shakes a cup at him. ‘When we lived here, do you remember, darling? I used to think it was glamorous to drink from cracked crockery. I suppose we should be getting back home soon. David, can we give you and Maggie a lift back to the station?’
Miriam cannot go and see the cottage full of its new owners. Julian’s so-called friends, the people who were scarce for so many years when he needed their support. To witness them in her home, judging her possessions, tainting her things with their glances, she can’t bear it. Instead she does what makes her feel better when she’s anxious. She potters. Habits that restore order restore equanimity. There was never time to tackle the chaos of Seymour’s house when he was ill. Even though the hospice nurses came in twice a day, by the time Miriam was home from work and made supper, put Peter to bed and pushed the buttons on the washing machine, she was too exhausted. In the last weeks of life as Seymour slipped in and out of consciousness, she’d taken compassionate leave from work and sat, day and night by his bedside, keeping him as comfortable as possible. Pandemonium mounted.
Today she’ll make a start. Mir
iam switches on the larder light. The one tiny window is covered in dense mesh; the air is still. Jars of pickled vegetables line the shelves like specimens in a museum. It’s impossible to read the faint writing on the pot labels. It’s probably stuff leftover from those halcyon days when the group tried to be self-sufficient. She sweeps the jars into a bin. But even the satisfying smash of glass cannot obliterate the question that swirls in her mind. Why did Seymour leave the cottage to them?
26
The cottage bulges with its new owners. Simon, Amy and seventeen-year-old daughter Chloe and, so she won’t be moody about being ‘stuck at the end of a mud track’, her best friend Tilly. There’s Maggie and her terrier, Merry, oddly named for the dog with a tendency to snap as he did at David’s six-year-old son, Marco, a lover of football but a hater of mud on his treasured boots. They decline Julian’s invitation to join Miriam and Peter for a drink at the farmhouse. Instead the group cram around the kitchen table for lasagne.
Simon stands. Forks hover. ‘Can I p-p-propose a t-t-toast?’ Amy remembers how shy he used to be about public speaking.
She sometimes wonders if he used his stammer as a way of making people listen.
‘To the gathering t-t-together of dear old friends in this b-b-beautiful c-c-cottage and also to absent f-f-friends.’
‘Absent friends.’ They raise their glasses.
A brief lull indicates a respectful nod to Seymour. The adults appreciate being remembered in his will but they can’t forget he treated them shabbily. Being back at Wyld Farm brings back memories.
Chloe finds the dinner difficult for other reasons. It is beyond her why the grownups are so pleased to be crammed into a cramped cottage ‘full of old grey things – and that’s just the furniture!’ she whispers to Tilly later.
All her parents and their funny friends do is reminisce. With laughter and veiled innuendo, their stories make her wither. To make things worse, they play terrible music. Rod Stewart was tolerable but Maggie’s favourite ‘prog rock’ band, Yes, made a literally horrifying sound.
‘Why weren’t the band named ‘No’?’ Chloe says, collapsing dramatically on to the mattress she and Tilly have been told is where they will sleep. ‘God! Are we really meant to use this?’
There’s a knock on the door. David sticks his head around the door. ‘Sleep well, girls,’ he says.
Even though he’s old, David is not completely uncool; her mother mentioned he played in a band. The quiff is unfortunate but it’s better than Maggie’s hair which looked as though it’s been chewed by a rat. Apparently Maggie is a teacher. Chloe wonders how someone so tetchy can work with students.
‘Thought I’d mention that Julian once slept in this room,’ David says. ‘He heard a ghost. But I wouldn’t worry, I’m sure it’s gone by now.’
Chloe who has successfully maintained her sangfroid expression all evening, bursts out laughing.
‘We’ll send the ghost up to your room,’ she retorts, ‘so prepare to be spooked.’
Her parents, washing up in the kitchen, are pleased their daughter is being friendly at least.
Announcing that she wants the single room ‘because it has the right vibes’; (Simon raises his eyebrows in derision but says nothing) Maggie stands by the bathroom door with her wash bag and towel.
‘David, you take the bedroom with the fireplace, the one Simon and I used to have. There’s enough wall space for you and Amber to hang your instruments.’
This is the first time David’s girlfriend had been mentioned. ‘Which leaves the other double room for Amy and Simon. It’s where you used to sleep, Amy. Though you were with David then, weren’t you? How things change, eh? Alright, I’ll be as quick as I can. But I do like a soak.’
She closes the bathroom door behind her.
Half an hour later Maggie finally vacates a steamy bathroom. David is already in bed after a pee in the garden and a wash in the kitchen sink. The Websters use the bathroom. Simon ignores the green mould behind the loo.
By 11 o’clock, the cottage is quiet save for the giggling of the teenagers. Renovations made a quarter of a century ago did not include sound proofing. Maggie bangs on the floorboards of her room above where the teenagers lay.
‘Shut up can you, Chloe and Tilly? I want to sleep!’ There is peace in Bramble Cottage.
Over the next few weekends, the new owners arrive as early as they can on Fridays. Re-establishing relationships and talking about old times is fun when combined with fine weather, tents for the teenagers, ear plugs and plenty of wine. Tolerating other people’s and their children’s (or animals’) habits is eminently possible when one can escape for a walk in the glorious countryside. Irritations are mollified when the scent of flowers blows in through open windows. Idiosyncratic behaviour is a delightful indulgence when viewed from a hammock.
But on the third Saturday afternoon when the weather turns overcast, Amy finds dog excrement in the carefully-prepared vegetable patch again, Marco scribbles over the mandala poster that Maggie had hung in the kitchen, Simon leaves a pan caked with scrambled egg unwashed in the sink and David rehearses one guitar solo again and again, the honeymoon period concludes.
‘Utopia d-d-does not happen without organisation,’ Simon says. ‘Let’s have a d-d-drink and blue-sky how we’re going to run the cottage.’
Maggie snorts with derision.
Amy says: ‘You’re not at work now, darling, people don’t use words like that, not in real life. Simon simply means to say let’s talk things through.’
‘I’ll put Marco in front of a Marx Brothers video,’ says David.
‘Now that sounds fun,’ says Maggie.
Simon brings out a bottle of Claret, noting it’s the third one he’s shared that weekend. They’ll need a budget for cottage wine as well as household stuff. Though Maggie professes not to drink alcohol, she’d pours a fair amount of it down her throat.
Amy fetches chairs from upstairs, suppressing irritation when Maggie does not help but lets her dog lick her mouth, a habit Amy finds revolting.
‘Having a rota would work for me. I’d like to come here with my girlfriend and band so we can rehearse,’ David says.
‘I’d like to bring Dad and Vi down for a weekend. I was thinking we could plant a garden, perhaps some fruit bushes. Would people like that?’ Amy asks.
‘Do you really w-w-want to look after a g-g-garden, darling? Especially if we do b-b-buy a p-p-place in France.’
‘Merry needs space to run around,’ says Maggie.
‘And Marco will want to play football. Not sure there’s enough space,’ David adds.
‘Okay, so just grass in the garden. A lawn will need regular cutting. We’ll need to agree who does what and when. And while we don’t need rules, not exactly…’ Amy looks at Simon for support, ‘there might be certain things that aren’t, that wouldn’t be allowed.’
‘Like what?’ says Maggie.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Is this about my dog?’
‘Well, I’d have thought it best if Merry doesn’t do his business in the garden.’
‘I call that a rule,’ Maggie complains. ‘My dog should be able to poo where he feels moved to do so.’
‘But not in my… I mean the garden,’ Amy replies.
‘Alright, alright. But if we’re making rules, I’ve got one. My Buddha statue. It must be given respect.’
‘It’s a bit c-c-creepy,’ Simon mutters.
‘My Buddha is not creepy, Simon, my Buddharupa is special,’ Maggie is bristling. She notes the years have added rigidity to her former boyfriend’s attitudes. ‘Someone has been moving it. Where I put it should be where it remains.’
She bought the statue on a trip to India over twenty years ago. A visit she often referred to (some students thinks rather too often) when teaching the grounding of the English language.
‘It’s a Meditation Buddha and will bring serenity to our cottage.’
Simon looks askance.
Amy says quickly: ‘Fair enough. No one is to move the Buddha. So, repairs to the cottage. Perhaps we should start a fund, pay in regular amounts. Anyone like to manage that?’
No one speaks.
‘I mean, there are d-d-damp patches behind the c-c-cooker and toilet, the bathroom tap’s leaking and …’
‘It all sounds rather expensive,’ David says.
‘But necessary to do, surely?’ Amy wonders if David is still tight with money.
‘I’m not loaded like you lot. Child support and all that.’
‘We’re not loaded,’ protests Amy.
‘You drink nice wine,’ said David.
‘Which we’re h-h-happy to s-s-share…’
‘…and you’re buying a cottage in France,’ David adds.
‘We m-m-might one d-d-ay.’
‘I hope owning Bramble Cottage will be a positive thing,’ Maggie says drily.
The atmosphere has stiffened. She’s put into words what everyone is starting to wonder.
‘A t-t-top-up anyone?’ says Simon brightly.
No one demurs.
‘I’ll need another bottle then. Oh dear, there doesn’t seem to be one. Does the pub sell wine?’
‘Wave to Amy,’ Miriam says to Peter as they drive past the cottage on Monday morning. Her neighbour is still in night clothes in the porch staring glumly at the rain.
Miriam has been up for almost two hours getting herself and her son ready for work and nursery. She will drop him there on the way to the office.
There is still a frisson of pride as she dresses each morning. Two years of night school and weekend study snatched when Peter napped to prepare for the accountancy exams was worthwhile. Her promotion and the accompanying rise in pay were welcome, particularly as she was the main breadwinner for the family. Maggie waves to the man on the tractor who drives by. In reality she is the only breadwinner.
Wyld Dreamers: a gripping drama about secrets from the past Page 15
