Green Grass

by Raffaella Barker

  Laura, trying to read on the other side of the room, shuts her book. ‘Inigo, we’d like to stay here until Sunday. There’s so much for the children to do, and I’ve hardly seen Hedley, or got anything sorted out with Tamsin. And most of all, I really don’t want to go back tonight.’

  The phone cuts through her words and and Inigo dives to answer it. Grinning, he sprawls, listening to Jack. ‘That sounds good – well done … No, I haven’t been running today. I thought I’d give myself a break because I’ve got sodding holes in my face … Yeah, some sort of feral beast called a ferret. I’m thinking of making an installation including a stuffed one and calling it Death Threat II, but I’m worried it would be a bit derivative.’

  Laura returns to her book, jaw set, determined that she will not be coerced into going home a day early because Inigo is bored and wants to show off his war wounds. She turns the page, her hand trembling, angry blood rushing, burning her cheeks. Outside is the answer, and a walk, or else she won’t be able to contain her annoyance and she’ll start a row with Inigo.

  Dusk is falling as she walks down through the garden and out onto the marshes, the Labrador Diver at her side, his nose down, vacuuming the evening scents as he goes. The fog has lifted, and the last gleam of afternoon sun is a primrose wash across the western sky. Above and below, sky and sea reflect a purple haze, deepening fast as the light fades. The cold air sears Laura’s face, exhilarating and fresh, cooling her thoughts, mending her temper. She thinks back over the past months. These moments of despairing panic are becoming more frequent, more intense. She has a sense of suffocating, a need for air, for space to breathe. When did life become so stultifying, and why does she feel like this? It’s not the children, they’re difficult, but not yet impossible, Laura thinks, remembering Tamsin. They are in a lull before the hormone storm of teendom breaks. It isn’t even really Inigo, although it is always tempting to blame her own lowness on him. But he’s always been demanding and egocentric, and she has accepted it, lived with it and learned to use it as a shield to keep herself out of the limelight. Inigo’s temperament makes it imperative that Laura should the one who walks behind, picking up the pieces, but it’s fine, she is good at it, and she has her own passions which can occasionally be indulged. Or she used to.

  Wondering if she can remember what she really enjoys, Laura stops by the duck pond and chucks a stick into the grey water, its surface broken already by the evening breeze. A crashing splash indicates that Diver sees this as a game, then a beating rush of wings heralds three ducks flying up in perfect formation, quacking outrage as they vanish into the dusk. Laura can just make out the darker blob of Diver’s head as he glides silently through the water, the stick borne high above the surface.

  ‘Come on, boy, let’s go back.’ Laura turns towards home, frowning in concentration, trying to recall any pleasures that don’t involve children, Inigo or work. What does she like? What makes her laugh? All she can come up with are dogs and country and western music – not that any of those songs make you laugh, but they offer incomparable solace. Laura has often felt her interests to be inadequate. With both parents historians and a classicist brother, her degree in film studies always seems lightweight and not worth taking seriously, and with Inigo, it is essential for a bearable life to let his passions come first. Thus Laura knows a great deal she doesn’t want to know about sport, and has been known to resort to reminiscing about her childhood to make it seem that she has hidden depths. Not that she needs them really, as Inigo has so much to say about himself and it’s easier to think about him.

  Ruefully she remembers a conversation with her friend Cally when Inigo gave up smoking. Enunciating slowly at first then speeding into a rant, Cally said, ‘I can’t believe this. When you gave up, you didn’t think it was worth mentioning, and I didn’t find out for months, but now you’ve actually rung me up to tell me Inigo’s done it. Honestly, Laura, I keep telling you – get a bloody life.’

  Cally’s right; there should be something more to mark the passing years. If Laura were a man, she would label this her mid-life crisis, and perhaps buy a red sports car, or take up the gym. As a woman, social pressure suggests a face-lift or a toy boy, but she cannot imagine herself with either. But what can she have? Can anything physical staunch this sensation of loss and panic, or would it be better to have counselling? Back at college, twenty-year-old Laura would have known that all she needed was happiness. Her older self thinks what she needs is change.

  Walking across the barnyard on her way back to the house, she peers through a doorway and into the big barn. Inside, the cavernous space is empty around one small, ancient tractor. Its tyres are almost flat, and dust and cobwebs have given the smudged blue panels a ghostly blur. Inigo would love it; it might distract him from going back to London. Laura hastens back to the house to fetch him to look at it.

  The sitting room has traces of Inigo: his computer disks are stacked neatly in two piles, the cushions have been balanced along the sofa back, and a tennis player is thwacking a ball vigorously but silently across the television. Inigo, however, is not here. Nor is anyone else. Laura walks through to the hall to shout up the stairs, sensing more than hearing the pulsing beat of Tamsin’s stereo system far away in the attic and wondering where Hedley and Fred have got to. The telephone rings. Laura picks it up

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, this is Guy. I wonder if I could speak to Hedley?’

  ‘Guy. Yes. Hello. How odd. I don’t…’ Laura tails off, obscurely embarrassed, suddenly tonguetied and desperate that he doesn’t realise it is her, although she doesn’t know why, and there is no reason why he should.

  ‘Hello, hello, are you still there? Please could I speak to Hedley?’ Guy speaks slowly, enunciating clearly as if to a long-distance, non-English-speaking operator. He must think she is a half-wit. In fact, he thinks she is Tamsin.

  Laura doesn’t speak but says, ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Tamsin, would you take a message for me? He wanted to talk to me about organic weed warfare. Get him to call me back when he comes in, would you?’

  Laura nods, then mumbles, ‘All right,’ and puts the telephone down. How fascinating that Guy, who has lain dormant in the outer recesses of her memory for years, should re-emerge both in person and on the telephone twice in one week. Cally, who lives on a houseboat in Little Venice with a cat called Hybrid, and has delusions of being a gypsy soothsayer, would insist it was portentous, but Laura knows better.

  ‘Hi, Mum – look, I shot this pigeon. It was so cool, it just fell out of the tree when I hit it. I missed the other one that was flying – Hedley got that.’

  Fred and Hedley clatter into the house. Fred is pink-cheeked and incandescent with excitement, waving his feathered trophy; Hedley, almost as delighted, is a long way from the tweedy academic he was for so long, bearing a gun, a stout stick and some sharp knives. Laura notices how attractive the trappings of outdoor life are, even on her brother. She must try and help him find a girlfriend. A motherly figure is what Tamsin needs in her life too.

  Fred slaps the pigeon on the kitchen table. ‘I’m going to pluck it and then we can cook it,’ he says with relish.

  ‘That’s wonderful, well done.’ Laura wonders what twisted element in her mothering makes her delighted when Fred spends an afternoon murdering helpless creatures but furious and frustrated if he should sit for three hours quietly occupied by the television. She helps them shed their weapons and waterproof coats, and makes tea for the three of them, as no one else is around, listening to their exchanged comments and observations about the marsh, astonished by the interest Fred shows and the knowledge he has picked up over a few weekend visits here.

  ‘Mum, I think we should move in here and live with Hedley,’ Fred announces, cramming a large piece of cake into his mouth to add, somewhat inaudibly, ‘I don’t ever want to go back to London, there’s nothing to do.’

  Laura laughs. ‘That’s exactly the opposite of Dolly’s view. She wouldn’t li
ke it one bit; neither would your father.’

  ‘No,’ says Hedley emphatically. ‘Inigo couldn’t possibly live here. He’d be a nightmare – I mean he’d find it a nightmare.’

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Laura whispers, leaning across the kitchen table as Fred moves out of earshot to graze in the fridge. ‘It’s never going to happen. Inigo can’t even bear two nights here.’

  Hedley’s hairy eyebrows, which have been drifting down over his eyes, leap up to his hairline with surprise. ‘Are you going then?’

  Laura shakes her head. ‘No, but I think he might.’

  ‘He might what? I love it when you talk about me.’ A warm hand runs over Laura’s shoulders; she twists in her chair to look up at Inigo, all trace of his earlier truculence evaporated, now smiling at her, the four puncture wounds in his chin making him look as though he has just been sewn together.

  Laura stands up, not ready yet to forgive him for trying to bully them all back to London. ‘I thought you were going home.’

  He kisses her forehead. ‘I can’t. I need to be with you. I’m staying for as long as you want to.’ He is trying to be good. Laura decides to thaw.

  She smiles at him. ‘I found something you will love in the barn.’

  ‘Take me and show me.’ His eyes are dark; Laura’s heart races looking into them.

  ‘I will. After tea I’ll show you.’

  Hedley coughs, embarrassed by the intimacy of his sister and Inigo over crumpets and tea. Inigo has always been very un-English in his tendency to touch and stroke, and Hedley has never been able to relax and accept it, tending to look away, leave the room or change the subject while Inigo’s hands move slowly across Laura’s shoulders, or his hands tangle in the weight of her hair. Now is not too bad, they are simply standing still in the circle of one another’s arms, so Hedley fixes his gaze a couple of inches above them and says, ‘Good, so you’re all staying. Marvellous. Let’s tell Dolly and Tamsin.’

  Laura breaks away from Inigo. ‘Oh Hedley, I forgot to tell you. Guy rang – he wants to have a word with you about something organic.’

  ‘How odd, he was talking about you the other day. Did you make a plan to meet up with him?’

  ‘He thought I was Tamsin.’

  Hedley sighs. ‘Well, why didn’t you say that you weren’t Tamsin, you were you?’

  ‘I don’t know, the moment passed.’

  Her brother claps his hand against his forehead in mock exasperation. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t matter. We don’t want to go there – we’d have to see Celia and she’s poisonous.’

  ‘Who’s Celia?’

  ‘Guy’s wife.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Is she poisonous to touch, or just if you bite her?’ Fred has found a miniature axe and is chopping small pieces of kindling into matchsticks by the fire then lighting them one by one. Inigo crouches to help him, showing him how to split the wood so that each splinter comes away whole and springing from the block. Laura walks around the kitchen table in circles, picking up a cup, putting it down again, moving the cake plate from one end of the table to the other. It is disconcerting to think of Guy’s life, and indeed his wife, existing here in Norfolk when, if she had thought about him at all in the past years, Laura had vaguely supposed him to inhabit a parallel universe.

  It certainly seemed that he came from one when she first met him. Laura and Hedley were exploring a network of rutted tracks near Crumbly. Hedley had just passed his driving test, and the invisible Uncle Peter hadn’t seemed to mind them borrowing the farm car and heading off all day. Driving in through an entrance surrounded by iron pig-stys, Hedley slewed the car in the mud, but persevered through thick fir trees, their evergreen shade creating a still, menacing light on this dark winter morning. They rounded a final bend in the track and Hedley slammed on the brakes with a jolt. ‘What on earth is that?’ he whispered.

  Laura, who had been leaning back to reach for something from behind, turned and the breath stuck in her throat. Towering above them, so near their wheels were on the edge of the first rank of steps leading up to the front door, was a vast derelict building, so ruined it was hard to see whether it had once been a church or a house. A bell tower was tethered on one wall, and half a pediment straddled the front, but beyond the façade, windows without walls or floors behind them revealed the ghosts of rooms, now filled with falling beams and sprouting foliage.

  Hedley had turned the engine off, but Laura tugged at him. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’s creepy here.’

  ‘No way. I want to look round.’ Her brother got out of the car and climbed over one of the ground-floor windows. Laura waited, the radio turned on to keep her company. Hedley returned a few minutes later with another youth his own age.

  ‘Laura, this is Guy Harvey. He lives here.’

  The newcomer had dishevelled blond hair and laughing blue eyes, and when Laura said hello to him she had a flashing moment’s thought that she had stepped into a lopsided fairy story and here was Prince Charming waiting to be rescued. In fact, Guy Harvey was the son of the local demolition man, and the two of them lived in a caravan next to the house. Guy and Hedley became inseparable friends and Laura tagged along with them more often than not, climbing in the ruin. They once had a picnic at night, the three of them lying, looking up at the stars, from a giant Edwardian bath teetering thirty feet up on a heap of rubble in the shattered east wing of the house. Laura was sixteen, and it was the first time Guy ever kissed her.

  Alf Harvey, who had notably small feet and a round body which rolled from side to side when he walked, had bought the ruin when his wife died two years before Laura met Guy. His version of moving in was to arrive with a mobile home and a crane dangling a vast black iron ball, his plan to knock the ruin down and build a village of spanking new houses on the site. A man with a mission to flatten and renew, never to preserve or restore, Alf was astonished to find that his idea was met with disapproval in the neighbourhood, and before he could position his crane and ball for maximum effect, the local council’s heritage officer arrived waving a preservation order. The building, or what was left of it, was preserved just as it was, beams exposed like bones on a rotting carcass, and even a shattered four-poster bed twisted in the remains of a doorway. Parking his mobile home in the stableyard, Alf set up residence with his son Guy, and spent the remaining years of his life trying to win over the planners. He had no interest in the fields and woodland, the streams and hedges which lay beyond the four walls of his giant white elephant.

  Guy was an only child, fifteen and still missing his mother painfully. He began to mend the fences, lay hedges and unblock the choked stream so water could meander through the low-lying water meadows instead of flooding. Six months after his father and he moved in, Guy let his first field to a pig farmer; a year later he grew a patch of peas and another of strawberries. By the time he met Hedley and Laura, he had left school and was letting and farming the whole two hundred acres around his father’s house and even making a small profit, driven by a barely recognised desire to create order.

  Laura had never met anyone, save her Uncle Peter, whose livelihood came from the land. It was both quaint and impressive. She didn’t know anyone of seventeen, either, who had left school. Guy, for his part, had never met a girl who found his life glamorous. They fell in love with the exoticism of one another.

  Chapter 7

  Back in London, it takes some days for the aroma of ferret to be eradicated from the car and every item of Fred’s clothing. And as much as the smell clings to him, he clings to the memories of the weekend and the hope that Precious the ferret will have babies and he will be given one of his own.

  ‘Anyway, Hedley said I could keep it there, so it’s nothing to do with you AT ALL,’ he roars defiantly at the end of a heated conversation with his father.

  Inigo, stirring rusty sweet-smelling tomato sauce at the stove, is at his most implacable. For his weekly cook-athon he is wearing an apron Laura’s mother A
nne once gave him. It is made of yellow oilcloth with a red logo saying Camp Coffee, beneath which is a picture of a jaunty soldier marching about with a coffee cup. Inigo wears this apron every Thursday and for most of the weekend as he slices and chops vegetables, kneads and mixes dough and batter and cooks and cooks and cooks, laying waste to the kitchen and becoming more theatrical with each finished, and perfectly presented, dish. These are the meals for the week, and those that are to be frozen are carefully labelled and wrapped, and then placed in the freezer in chronological order of when they are to be eaten. All food preparation is taken out of Laura’s hands.

  There are people who are envious of Laura for having such a domesticated husband; indeed, her mother who telephones in the midst of the ferret discussion, reminds her, ‘Of course it’s marvellous he’s such a cook, even if he does hate animals. It must be a price worth paying. After all, just imagine how awful it would be for everyone if you had to do it all.’

  Laura appreciates the double edge of this thrust, and grins invisibly into the phone, thinking, ‘Touché’, but saying, ‘I know, I realise it’s extraordinary. It’s one of his compulsions. He can’t help it, it’s the Jewish momma in him trying to get out. The maddening thing is that the children don’t like the wild flavours he creates, and of course he won’t listen or adapt. He’s a megalomaniac in the kitchen. I have no role beyond skivvy. I’m a tweeny, in fact.’

  Laura’s mother is baffled. ‘A tweeny? Are you? Do you mean the ones on television? How odd of you.’

  She sounds displeased. Laura is not living up to expectation at all with nonsense about children’s television characters and a husband who cooks better than she does. Not that Anne herself ever brought Laura up to cook. Oh dear me no. She was destined for the halls of academe where filthy food is served to intellectuals who use it merely as fuel for the engines of their minds, and have no sensory pleasure in it. Such a shame she decided not to pursue her studies further. Anne had always hoped Laura would stay in America and do a PhD after her master’s degree, but of course she met Inigo. Maddening, but there we are. She wasn’t doing anything proper like history after all, but a PhD in film – well, it would have been something for Anne to tell her colleagues at Trinity. She listens to Laura again.