Green Grass

by Raffaella Barker

  Marjorie suddenly squats on the grass, then rolls down until she is lying full length, an arresting spectacle with her laced-up shoes and pleated skirt. She calls out, ‘Bruschee-etta, Aaa-ïoooli, here, pups, here now!’ And from the tumbling mass on Dolly’s knee, the smallest black, and one fawn puppy pounce up to Marjorie and hurl themselves on her chest.

  ‘Bruschetta is the bitch. Aïoli is the black dog. Both perfect pugs. Faultless.’ Marjorie sits up and taking each puppy in turn, fondles them, turning them over, pinching their ears gently, splaying the pads of their paws. ‘And you know all the pug protocol, of course, so I won’t go into that with you, but do look, they’re responding to training awfully well, and they’re only seven weeks old.’

  Marjorie topples them onto their backs and they loll, tongues protruding pinkly, looking absurd and like Chinese lions on the springy grass. Laura finds that her mouth is hanging slack and open with longing. Fred prods her; even he has been beguiled by the snub-nosed enquiring faces of the baby pugs.

  ‘Come on, Mum, you know you want one – that’s why we came. It’s just what we need to catch the rabbits in Norfolk. Just choose.’ Laura realises he must be smitten to imagine that a pug could catch a rabbit.

  Dolly rushes up to her mother, yanking her arm, begging with tears in her eyes, ‘Oh Mum, I think it would be such fun,’ she whispers.

  Laura imagines herself in the garden she believes to exist at the Gate House. In her mind’s eye, she is sitting at a small table under a lilac tree in full bloom. A few hens, just like Marjorie’s in fact, scratch about nearby, and a manly figure, perhaps even Inigo, can be seen doing something useful and not balancing things, over to the right, while to the left Dolly is picking a perfect bunch of fragrant flowers in happy animation instead of sulky torpor and Fred is leading a chocolate ferret through a tiny box hedging maze and teaching it to remember its way, as a true ferret whisperer does. The tea tray is there, and so is the pug, smug and black on a cushion at her feet. The picture is perfect. Highly camp perhaps, but perfect.

  Laura, with the sensation of walking off a cliff, shuts her eyes and says firmly, ‘Marjorie, we’ll have Aïoli, the boy, if we may. Oh, and the ferret too. We’ll collect them next weekend.’

  Laura and the twins depart, very much poorer and none the wiser as to what ‘pug protocol’ might be.

  ‘Oh, we can look it up on the Internet,’ says Dolly, embracing as much of her mother as she can without garrotting her from the back seat. ‘Let’s get going to Crumbly now, we’ve got to make a dog room immediately.’

  ‘And a ferret house,’ adds Fred.

  Laura, accelerating northwards, is so touched and delighted by her children’s excitement that she has no remorse at spending Inigo’s money on something he will detest. Adolescent enthusiasm is a quality beyond price.

  Chapter 11

  Enthusiasm fuels Dolly, Fred and Laura all the way from Suffolk and right up to the front door of the Gate House, where it runs out abruptly.

  ‘We can’t get in, there’s no key,’ moans Dolly from beneath a pile of pillows and clothes. ‘I can’t carry all this and there’s nowhere to put it down.’

  This is true. Looking around, Laura is surprised by how her memory had pruned and weeded the garden, which in reality is a seething mass of early sprouting nettles and brambles with a few bright yellow daffodils dropping their petals into a small dank pond. It is dusk, and the air is damp and cold; a low white mist, which Laura remembers is the sea har, creeps into the further reaches of the garden. Shivering, she dumps her box of food on a rickety old chair by the weed-strewn path and kneels by the front door, feeling with her hands for a stone under which a key might lie.

  ‘Mum, quick, there’s a goat here, and its udder is massive. Shouldn’t we milk it?’ Fred rushes from the back of the cottage where he has been exploring, his trousers dark up to the knees with wet from the tangled grasses.

  ‘I didn’t know we were having a goat,’ says Laura faintly. ‘I just want the key.’ She looks up at the darkening sky and, astonishingly, sees a key dangling from a piece of string tied to the old apple tree. ‘What a weird place for a key,’ she marvels.

  Dolly snatches it. ‘Oh thank God, let’s get inside and then we’ll think about the sodding goat.’

  From the state of the garden, Laura had been dreading what might be in the house, but to her relief the electricity is on, and Hedley has clearly been making an effort. A small and ancient Rayburn stove is lit and giving off delicious heat. Dolly and Fred rush as one to lean against it, both wrapped in duvets, their lips tinged blue because the warmth of today has left them bare-legged and unprepared for a chilly evening. In front of the Rayburn is a chipped red gloss painted table and four multi-coloured chairs that Laura remembers decorating one teenage summer. On the table is a jam jar of tulips and a note.

  Welcome Laura and family.

  I’ve sorted the house out a bit. Sorry about the goat, I had her at home, but she kept getting out and coming back here. I think she’s missing Mrs Jenkins. Could you just keep an eye on her and I’ll make plans for her next week? Her name is Grass. I’ll drop by to see you all at breakfast-time, with Tamsin if I can get her up. Love, Hedley.

  Laura presses her hands over her eyes. ‘We’re acquiring animals as if it’s it’s Christmas,’ she says bleakly. ‘A pug, a ferret – and now a goat. She’s called Grass and I think we’d better try and milk her before she explodes. It doesn’t sound as though Hedley has even thought of it.’

  ‘How, how, how?’ clamours Fred, hopping with excitement at the prospect of an interactive animal. He and Dolly rummage for boots in one of their dustbin bags of clothes. Laura, frustrated by trying to choose what anyone might wear, finally packed everything by pouring all the contents of the children’s drawers into black bin liners. Surely it will be a perk of having her own house that she will leave country clothes here? Inigo will love that degree of domestic organisation, it might make up for the dog. Or the goat. But definitely not for the ferret. Nothing will make up for the ferret.

  Dolly and Fred vanish out into the dark wielding a cup and a saucepan, Fred’s torch dancing a beam before them. Laura looks helplessly at the tide of clothing chaos spreading across the bumpy tiled floor of her new kitchen. She needs to get all this stuff put away, but there is nowhere to put it. In the end she drags it in a heap to the bottom of the stairs and dumps it. They can sort it, she decides, hearing their voices as they pass the window.

  ‘Here we come, Grass. Don’t worry, we’re highly qualified milkmen,’ yells Dolly.

  ‘I’m going to aim the milk so it goes into the cup first and then flows over and into the pan,’ boasts Fred.

  ‘Fat chance,’ laughs Dolly, and Laura grins, as they move away towards the shed busy answering the call of nature instead of indulging in their usual evening activities which include zapping life away on a computer game. It is, she muses, a proud moment for a parent when offspring choose to milk a goat over watching Top of the Pops. Not that choice had much to do with it, of course, as there is no television, but Laura takes great pride in the fact that they haven’t even mentioned Top of the Pops since they arrived here.

  Twenty minutes later, when the twins still haven’t come in and she has cooked three rather rubbery omelettes and made lovely unhealthy Angel Delight for pudding, Laura heads outside to find them. She has a candle in a jam jar, but still she stumbles through the now inky night, regretting the lack of a streetlamp glow in the countryside for the first time in her life.

  ‘Ow, bastard,’ she curses as a bramble spirals around her ankle.

  ‘Mum, are you there?’ Dolly’s face, ghostly pale in Laura’s candlelight, appears over the half-door of the shed. ‘Grass kicked Fred and it’s bleeding into the milk and Fred knocked the pan over so we’ve only got a tiny amount.’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t think we were planning to make ice cream with it.’ Thankful to be able to see where to go, Laura steps over the last few brambles and ente
rs.

  ‘No, but I thought we could make goat’s cheese and we could sell it at the school fair next week.’ Dolly’s arms, and even loose strands of her jaunty pony tail, droop with disappointment. Laura hugs her.

  ‘What a good idea. I hadn’t thought of goat’s cheese.’ She is beginning to see the point of Grass.

  Dolly and Fred have hung the torch on a hook in the roof, creating a well of light at the centre of the shed. Madly illuminated, with vast threatening shadows, Fred, nursing his bleeding hand, is squatting on the straw next to the goat. He and Grass look to Laura like extras in a voodoo horror film. Grass chews a mouthful of leaves placidly, her long yellow eyes unblinking and expressionless until Fred leans forward to touch her udder; she then aquires a look of evil cunning and a back leg springs like a piston towards Fred’s face. He dodges and tries again, this time successfully grabbing her. There is a satisfying hiss and Laura imagines a foaming stream of milk hitting the pan, swirling creamy and full.

  ‘Mmm, wonderful,’ she says, not noticing that she has stepped onto a pile of goat shit, black pellets round and coarse like peppercorns.

  ‘It’s not going very well, Mum,’ says Fred, passing the tin saucepan to show her. Laura is surprised and disappointed to see that the milk hardly covers the bottom of the pan and what they have is gruesomely tinged with pink. ‘It takes forever and she hates it. I’m starving and I’ve had enough. I wish I hadn’t spilt some.’

  Laura rubs his shoulders sympathetically. ‘I would have spilt it too,’ she says. ‘Let’s give up now. You’ve done so well, and I should think that getting any out is a bonus for her. We’ll try again in the morning. She’ll be better then because it’s when you’re meant to do milking.’ Laura is pleased with this notion, it makes sense. She is doing well so far as a countrywoman, and with the prospect of goat’s cheese in the morning, is pretty convinced that soon they will be self-sufficient. Congratulating herself and her children silently, she unties Grass who promptly steps back onto her foot,

  squishing it deeply and painfully into another pile of droppings. So great is the pain that even a combination of fluent swearing and karmic deep breathing takes several moments to soothe Laura.

  ‘Shit. Oww. Bugger. Literally shit,’ she groans. ‘I wonder if this bodes ill for all our animal husbandry? We’d better buy a goat manual tomorrow.’

  ‘Let’s call Dad and tell him what we’re doing,’ says Dolly, holding her mother’s arm and guiding her back towards the cottage as if she is a very ancient person. Laura rather enjoys this.

  ‘Mmm. Yes, we must,’ she agrees, while thinking, He’ll go spare. He thinks this is a decent centrally heated holiday cottage with double glazing; and he hates all animals, so he’s not going to like hearing that we’ve already got a goat.

  She sits down for supper with the children and lights a festive candle in a jam jar. ‘But let’s not talk to him right now,’ she adds. The omelettes are a small triumph; they taste much better than they look. This is an improvement on the last time Laura made omelettes, when no one could eat them because they were so full of eggshell and grease from the cooking oil she used in place of butter. She is bullish now, fuelled by two glasses of wine and feeling not unlike Elizabeth David. Defiance grows as she washes up in the ancient green-stained stone sink and thinks, What the hell, it’s time I did what I want to do for a bit. He always does, let’s ring him and tell him.

  She calls Dolly away from her self-imposed chore of decorating the loo door with the family photographs Laura has brought with her. These photographs span the whole of the twins’ lives and are kept permanently in the back of the car in an old box. Laura likes to have them with her wherever she goes, as she has a longstanding fantasy that she is going to stick them into an album, thus editing her family life to an existence of magazine glamour and happy smiling picnics.

  Dolly has begun her collage with a picture of Inigo baking, his arms a blur of flour, his expression relaxed, almost beatific, and nothing like it will be when Dolly tells him what they are doing. Next to it is one of Laura bathing the two-year-old twins, dishevelled with drops of water, pushing back her hair from her face and laughing. The tiny twins are laughing too. Laura stares at the snapshot, and feels nostalgia for that moment and a hundred like it. They were still in New York then, and life was simple. Inigo was a struggling young artist and Laura looked after the babies, none of this working together nonsense which now engulfs her life.

  Dolly, waving a phone in search of a signal, climbs onto a chair. ‘Hello? Hello, Dad. It’s me, Dolly … What? Oh bugger, the signal’s gone.’

  The chair wasn’t good enough, and now Dolly is standing on the kitchen table, towering over Fred who is carving a handle for a stick he found in the garden. The light from the one dusty lamp is dim, and Fred has his torch precariously balanced between the bread and a mug to illuminate his work. Dolly, redialling, crouches suddenly and makes a platform for the torch, securing it so no matter how she moves on the table, it remains stationary.

  Fred grins, she stands up again, shouting, ‘Dad, can you hear me? We’re at the Gate House. It’s like really medieval, there’s green stuff dripping in the bathroom – it’s so cool like a dungeon to look at but I so don’t want to ever have a bath in there, and we’ve got a goat, it’s like really adorable—’

  ‘I think that’s enough for him to get used to for this evening,’ Laura interrupts hastily, reaching up for the telephone. ‘Hello, Inigo? Inigo?’ She can hear nothing.

  Dolly shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t work, Mum. All he said was “Fuck” and then he got cut off. We’ll have to ring him from a land line tomorrow. Where do you think there is one?’

  Relieved, and virtuous because she has tried, Laura heads for bed, earlier than the children who are listening to a band called Wet Biscuit or similar on the radio. They are listening to the radio together. Laura allows herself a small smug moment. It’s like Cider with Rosie. Well, all right not exactly, because that was set in the West Country; maybe The Go Between, which was definitely set in Norfolk. Actually, not The Go Between – that repressed-love thing isn’t quite right. Anyway, this moment is very good and it’s definitely like a rite of passage novel set in the twentieth century in Britain but not Trainspotting. Laura loves it all, especially the fact that she is suddenly remembering snatches from so many books. Wishing to keep the cosy mood alive, she finds herself a Fair Isle jersey in her own dustbin bag, to wear on top of her nightie.

  Laura’s bedroom is small and in the eaves above the Rayburn. Despite the warm chimney breast, the temperature in the room is bracing, and it looks as if it will remain so, as the low casement window is jammed open and obscured now by thrusting clematis stems and a tangle of roses thorns. Hedley has added some homely touches in here, Laura notices. Two balding skin rugs from the attics at Crumbly have been hurled onto her floorboards, and another smaller skin inadequately covers the large mattress. The window is at floor level, and Laura drags her mattress into the middle of the room, positioning it so that she will be able to see out in the morning. A large beetle bursts through the foliage at the window and scrambles across the ceiling towards the light bulb, buzzing crossly. It misses and bounces off to swerve at Laura. She shrieks and hides her head in her hands, turning off the light and jumping onto the bed, hating the late-night business of lowlife creatures. In the dark she fumbles for socks and a scarf to add to her night attire, and would complete the outfit with a woolly hat if she could be bothered to go downstairs to get one. Making a mental note to buy hot-water bottles tomorrow, Laura falls asleep.

  She awakes with a start. There is no thump of music from downstairs, so Dolly and Fred must have gone to bed, but there are loud trundling noises near her head. Outside an owl hoots mellifluously, adding to the eeriness of the moment. Laura’s heart beats violently, she is stiff with fear; it takes an effort to relax her shoulders enough to move her arm. Holding her breath, she slowly reaches out to turn on the light. Two mice look at her for a mo
ment, then whisk out of sight, scampering beyond her bed and under the skirting board. Laura presses her hand against her mouth and manager not to utter a sound. She leaps off the mattress and runs down to find a woolly hat, the horror of the notion that the mice might build a nest in her hair pumping through her veins so she feels wide awake. It is almost light by the time she can relax enough to fall asleep again, and in the darkest moments, Laura admits to herself that Norfolk has a long way to go before it can compete properly with London. She drifts off amid happy thoughts of restaurants, shoe shops, florists and cinemas with not a mouse to be seen anywhere in the light, mud-free streets of the West End.

  Sleep is short-lived. Laura is woken by raucous birdsong. She tries stuffing a pillow in the window casement, but the dawn chorus continues unabated. By seven o’clock she is dressed; she stands on the doorstep with a cup of tea, watching the sun begin to sweep between the trees beyond her garden. It is impossible not to smile. Laura is suffused with a sense of peace, and holds onto this moment while her tea cools, before wandering out to have a proper look at the garden. Surrounded by a small wooden fence, and facing a clearing on the edge of the beechwood, Laura’s Gate House is like a child’s drawing, squat with a pointed gable above the front door and castellations like steps meeting at the top above her bedroom window. The garden at the front is neat, with a central path from the gate to the front door, and another path leading round the back, past a small orchard and an overgrown vegetable patch, to the shed where Grass lives. Beyond that is an area of rocketing nettles and long grass, a small silted-up pond, and then the path reappears by a dilapidated greenhouse, bringing Laura back to the front garden again.

  I can walk around my house, she thinks, when she has done it. What an amazing feeling. Laura and Inigo’s house in London is terraced, her parents’ house in Cambridge was a semi-detached villa, and Crumbly, although it isn’t joined to any other house, is impossible to walk round because of the hedges and barns which abut the building. Laura does it again a few times, reminding herself of Pooh and Piglet’s search for the Woozles as she follows her own footsteps through the long grass and back to the front door. On her third perambulation she notices that the drain under the kitchen window is blocked and she stoops to prod it with a stick. A frog, glistening bright green, scrambles for cover. Laura crouches to see where he has gone, and is startled to find a community of them leaping and darting away from her.