by Jenny Eclair
Faen, she thinks, mentally swearing in Norwegian, that’s all I need, a great big stinking invasion of black-headed caterpillars.
A week to go. Freya swallows her omelette uninterestedly, how boring to be forty-two and reduced to having to keep a constant eye on her figure.
It was the caesarean with Luna that did it, the puckered emergency slash across her belly that seems to have permanently damaged her abdominal muscle tone. Try as she might, she cannot completely firm up her scarred midriff; her bikini days are over.
Not that anyone can tell. She is otherwise lean and rangy, she has a personal trainer who comes twice a week to take her running and do weightlifting, plus she visits a neighbour’s barn conversion on Tuesday mornings for an invitation-only Ashtanga yoga class.
After the class, the women drink pink prosecco and complain about their husbands, who are variously too fat, dull and not rich enough.
Freya keeps quiet during these conversations. So much so, they’ve nicknamed her ‘Smug Freya’. She’s heard them discussing her: What has she got to complain about, with her big house, tennis court, sea views and studio outbuildings . . .
‘How many bedrooms again, Freya?’
‘Oh, it used to be ten, but one has been converted into a dressing room, so only nine now.’
‘Do you have a pool?’
‘No.’
‘Oh!’
Lance won’t – he is happy for the children to swim in the sea and in hotel pools when they go on holiday, but the one thing he will not have is their own private pool.
He’s superstitious, because a child drowned here years ago, how silly. A pool would firm up her tummy. Bloody Lance, he always has to have his own way.
On paper, everything is ‘theirs’, but it isn’t – it’s his. Lance wears his sense of entitlement more lightly than some, but he is still coated in it, like a wetsuit. What else would one expect from an upper middle class, privately educated, about-to-be-fifty-year-old man?
Not that he looks fifty. ‘Virile’ is the word that springs to mind when she thinks about her husband; he is broad-shouldered, his hair is thick, he tans easily, he oozes charm, everyone likes him.
She tries not to worry that he spends so much time in Exeter during the week, or that sometimes he has to stay in London to meet with prospective clients – ‘pressing flesh’, he calls it. She’s fine with all that, as long as the flesh is of the hand variety and not of the young female breast or buttock.
Freya forces her paranoia to one side. There is too much to do before next weekend to start worrying about her husband’s fidelity. She digs her notebook out of her ancient Mulberry satchel, wondering not for the first time why she hadn’t simply chartered a yacht around the Greek islands to celebrate her husband’s half-century. It would have been a damn sight easier and possibly a good deal cheaper than this wretched party.
Once she has her trusty notebook and pen in hand she feels better, more in control. She needs to check her to-do list, make some calls, send a few emails, stare at the three new outfits she has bought for the celebrations, and then check the BBC online weather forecast – but only the once, she mustn’t get obsessive about it.
The prospect of bad weather consumes her every waking moment. After a ten-week summer heatwave (surely global warming is even more reason to have a pool installed?) August has been unsettled. It shouldn’t matter, yet it does – she has visions of the weekend being a total washout with bedraggled bunting, rain-sodden hog roast and a forlorn mud-splattered ice-cream van under leaden skies. It can’t, it simply can’t. Freya can feel herself hyperventilating.
She closes her eyes and breathes long and deep, Kundalini yoga style, and wonders whether to take one of the tiny white pills she keeps in her sunglasses case for emergencies.
Instead, she decides to make a tour of the house, to check that the beds in the spare rooms have been made up, that the guest washrooms are adequately provided with the mini Banho soaps that she buys online from Liberty (the packaging amuses her; it’s not important, but it is).
She checks the supplies of towels and lavatory rolls and makes a plan as to where everyone should sleep, dithering over who should have the smallest single bedroom and deciding it will have to be her mother rather than Lance’s – Natasha takes priority, especially as this was her childhood home. Correction, second home – there was another house in Chester Square, Lance had pointed it out years ago on a trip to London, an impossibly grand Georgian number. Once upon a time, there had been even more money than there is now.
Fortunes lost and fortunes made. Lance is a good businessman, he can be hard-hearted and ruthless, no doubt a side of him inherited from his father, Hugo – the name that no one ever mentions. She knows about him, she knows that accusations were made but nothing was ever proved and she knows his death was shocking and unexpected, as shocking and unexpected as her own father’s. But unlike Lance, she misses her father and she wishes more than anything he could be visiting with her mother next week.
Freya continues her tour. For the duration of the party weekend the children’s playroom in the attic will be converted into a kids’ dormitory. Airbeds that blow up as soon as you plug them into the wall have been ordered – simple. All the kids will pile in together, which means her sister, who is coming sans husband but bringing her new baby, can have Luna’s room. Meanwhile Bel and Andrew will have the large spare at the back of the house with the en suite, which leaves the second-best spare double free for Toby and Lucy.
Toby is Lance’s best friend from university. Lucy is his second wife, his first having been put out to pasture several years ago. Freya tenses again. Bloody Lucy, with her tiny girlish frame and her disgusting home-rolled cigarettes.
With all the kids sharing, the weekend nanny can have Ludo’s room, which is conveniently situated at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the playroom. In an ideal world, the girl would sleep out on the landing, guarding her charges like the dog in Peter Pan, but Ludo’s room is the next best thing.
Who else, puzzles Freya, slightly disconcerted that there are still two bedrooms to be allocated. Of course! Annabel and Andrew’s children, those two fully grown hairy men. Obviously they can’t be lumped in with the littlies in the playroom – she doesn’t know them from Adam, there’s no telling what they might get up to.
Then Freya remembers Bel’s flustered phone call a few weeks ago, apologetically asking if it was all right if some girlfriend came too. ‘No problem,’ Freya had replied, instantly putting Bel out of her misery, her relief palpable even from several hundred miles away. What was it with that woman? She always seemed to be in a state about something.
The couple could share the twin bedroom next to the playroom on the top floor, which meant the other brother would be left with the day bed in the small single room on the half-landing.
This is Freya’s favourite spot in the house: a tiny lockable hiding place with an oriel window where she can curl up in the Etsy vintage quilt that is exactly the same colour as the blue glass vase on the Victorian washstand, watching the sky and the sea merge into each other like a Rothko painting.
When this is all over and the children are back at school, Freya vows to spend more time in her studio barn; she might get some private watercolour tuition, or maybe start experimenting in oils.
How odd to have children old enough to have partners, she thinks, unable to imagine Luna and Ludo as teenagers, never mind adults. She has a vague recollection of the photograph that accompanied Bel’s last Christmas card, in which the sons appeared to be doughy twenty-somethings, their beards smacking of laziness rather than Shoreditch hipster, tummies as round as babies’, their father a blur on the edge of the frame, while Annabel looked – what was the word? Frantic. Poor Annabel, how odd that she should have been abandoned here, that her past is so entwined with the house, even though she doesn’t truly belong.
Lance has told Freya the facts: that Bel was found in a drawer in the back bedroom and that Uncle B
enedict persuaded his sister to adopt her because Natasha kept losing babies. Only she hadn’t lost Lance – he had clung like a barnacle, the son and heir to everything.
Freya snaps out of her reverie; the doorbell is ringing. She has to race down the stairs; the trouble with having such a big house is that sometimes delivery people get sick of waiting and leave before you manage to get to the front door. Increasingly she is convinced it’s a spite thing, a sort of ‘Well, fuck you, Madame Muck, here’s a sorry-you-were-out slip’ and the inconvenience of a ninety-minute round trip to the sorting office.
Freya is breathless by the time she flings open the door and the postman hands her a single parcel. A quick check of the postcode confirms it’s what she has been waiting for and one of the knots that has been tugging in Freya’s chest immediately comes undone. Everything will be fine, everything is falling into place.
Several weeks ago, Freya had sent a precious ciné reel of Kittiwake taken back in the sixties off to a tech company to be transferred onto DVD. Finally, after an agonising wait, the tape and the original reel have arrived back safely.
Freya is relieved. She wants to project the DVD via laptop onto the bare brick walls of the barn where she plans to have the disco in the evening, but first she needs to see if the conversion has worked.
Freya attaches the Apple USB SuperDrive to her MacBook Air, inserts the DVD and wires it up to their state-of-the-art 82-inch Samsung TV.
The telly set Lance back a penny under four thousand pounds and promises HD, surround sound and dynamic crystal colour. Yet, for all that money, it has no built-in DVD player.
After a few seconds, bodies begin to dance on the screen. Freya turns the sound up, but it’s been recorded without audio. In the silence, skinny young men thrust their hips in front of girls in heavy eyeliner. They could almost be Millennials, but there is something other-worldly about the people on the screen: they are strangely similar but totally different from today’s youngsters.
Freya is surprised to find herself moved. These people will be old now, most of them approaching eighty, arthritic and deaf, some of them will be dead. Suddenly the DVD seems terribly sad.
Were any of you happy, she wonders, but her reverie is interrupted by a snort of laughter.
Lance is home early from Exeter, he has already helped himself to a cold beer from the drinks fridge and doubtless left the bottle-top on the counter. For a few seconds they watch the footage together, transfixed by the sight of a ridiculously pretty blonde dancing right up to the camera lens, then, as she leaves the frame, Lance points a finger at the television.
‘Freeze it,’ he commands. Freya obeys on instinct and Lance sits down heavily beside her. ‘That’s Benedict,’ he says. ‘He was quite a good-looking fellow back in the day, bit of a catch.’
He takes the remote off her and presses play. Benedict has stopped dancing and is gazing hungrily at something over his shoulder, then he begins to gyrate again, thumbs looped into the waistband of his purple trousers. Freya laughs, Benedict is dancing in a way that only men in the sixties ever could. ‘Bit of a goer,’ his nephew continues. ‘Truth is, he never grew out of it, became the eternal playboy, which, by the time he hit sixty, was a bit of a joke. Remember when he came to our wedding in that safari suit?’
Freya struggles to match the man on the screen with the slightly ridiculous creature she met ten years ago. Somehow, Benedict had transformed from this snake-hipped young man into a fat grey Simon Cowell lookalike, all unbuttoned shirts and lots of grizzly grey chest hair.
Lance looks wistful. ‘Sometimes, when he used to meet me from school, I could hear people laughing at him. But once you got to know him he was the most charming company, the kindest, sweetest chap. I think in the end he was a bit lonely, riddled with gout and holed up in Montreux. He never married – came close, but . . . no kids. I think that made him sad. Remember, we couldn’t go to his funeral? About four years ago – we were in Corfu. If I’d known he was going to leave me Kittiwake . . . ’ Lance trails off. He should have gone anyway.
Together they watch a very much alive and pouting Benedict strut around a previous incarnation of the same room they are sitting in now. He has a bottle of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
It is 1962. Benedict’s waist is a mere twenty-six inches, his hair grows thick around his temples and his liver is still a nice healthy pink. The beautiful blond girl reappears, takes him by the hand and leads him away from the camera.
‘Saucy,’ smirks Freya, wondering if she and Lance might take the opportunity of the kids being at tennis club to go upstairs and fuck each other’s brains out. Let’s face it, it’s been a while.
42
Natasha Thinks About Packing
On the Île de Ré, Natasha packs her case and unpacks it again. The action soothes her and she mutters under her breath, ‘Underwear, blouses, skirt, trousers, party outfit, cardigan, sweater, gifts, toiletry bag, shoes, nightie, dressing gown and slippers.’ She tries to relax – there are still five whole days before she will have to zip the thing up.
It is five days, isn’t it?
She checks her calendar, counting the five empty squares that lead from today until the square that contains the handwritten word ‘Cornwall’ in shaky blue biro. It’s definitely five days – as long as she’s got today’s date right. She glances at her watch and the little number in the glass bubble confirms she has five more days.
Her passport and flight information are on the sideboard. Her passport expires next year. She doubts she will get it renewed. The photograph inside is nine years old, she hopes she will still be recognisable to the authorities; how embarrassing to be turned away from passport control because your ancient face no longer matches your ID. Natasha decides to make herself up with extra care when she travels, plenty of foundation and lots of powder on top, that’s the trick, like plastering a cracked wall. Her mother’s face springs to mind, the perfect white oval with the crimson lips that gradually bled into the fine lines above her fraying mouth, the same mouth that one day long ago formed a scream that didn’t seem to stop for days. She still hears it sometimes, and has to turn up the radio until her heart stops jumping. Stop it, she reminds herself, stop thinking, the house won’t be anything like it used to be – Lance has promised her she ‘won’t recognise the place’.
Natasha swallows hard and sits down, she wishes she could make do with hand luggage only, but with the weather being unpredictable and the toys she has bought for Ludo and Luna, plus the gift for the birthday boy himself, she simply can’t.
Natasha likes to be properly dressed for any occasion. How she looks has always mattered to her – it pains her not to have the right coat or jacket for any occasion, the correct shoes. Hers are a dainty size four; despite her age, her feet are still elegant. Too bad her hands are lined and liver spotted . . .
A small pilot light of fury flares up in her chest as she remembers how Hugo put a stop to her hand modelling. She wouldn’t have gone much further; feet and ankles yes, possibly up to the knee, she had good legs, they are still slim, possibly too slim – her appetite isn’t what it was. She dreads the meals at Kittiwake. She hopes they won’t mind if she leaves something on the side of her plate – ‘Something for Mr Manners,’ her old nanny used to say. She hopes the children like their gifts and if they don’t, she hopes they are polite enough to pretend to. When Lance and Annabel were growing up, she made them write thank-you letters the week after Christmas – any later would have been rude.
Bringing up children isn’t easy, she concedes, you can have all the rules under the sun, but if a child decides to go off the rails then there’s not much you can do to stop them.
Memories of the rows Annabel had with Hugo echo in her head, the door-slams and yelling.
It was the ingratitude that Hugo couldn’t bear – after everything they had done for the girl, to have her repay them like that, behaving so badly at such a crucial time. She was lucky Downley Manor let her sit
her exams, but she never went back to the sixth form and it was as much her decision as theirs.
Natasha remembers Annabel informing Hugo and herself that she intended to take her A levels – English, French and Domestic Science – at the local technical college. She needed to make a fresh start, she insisted. Hugo had ranted, Natasha had wept, but the girl could be quite determined, her jaw set into an unattractive poke, and in the end they had caved in.
Benedict had backed the girl all the way. In private, he had told Natasha that while he might not be her father, he still counted himself as the girl’s uncle and as far as he was concerned it was not in Annabel’s interests to go back to an institution where the pupils were treated like fifties debutantes.
So Annabel went to college in Chiswick and on Saturdays she worked in a wine merchant’s owned by a friend of Benedict’s, where she earned money that she spent on clothes and records like any other teenager, a fact which made Hugo furious for some reason.
Control, she supposed. Her husband was a very controlling man and Annabel at sixteen began to confront him in a way that Natasha had never dared.
Natasha finds herself rubbing at bruises that faded many years ago. She had always borne the brunt of Hugo’s cruel streak and she recalls the countless dark-grey pinch marks under her arms. His violence could be sly and unexpected: a swift kick that came out of the blue, a bite on the breast when they were fighting in bed. Her husband was always careful to keep his blows below her face, because as long as no one guessed what was going on behind closed doors, then he could keep on doing it.
His cruelty wasn’t only physical. He was unfaithful, and delighted in parading his conquests in front of her. His favourite trick involved deftly removing an unlit cigarette from an attractive woman’s lips in order to light it between his own. How he would have hated the smoking ban.
