The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

Shuffling their shoes off in the porch, as courtesy required, they all trooped into the house.

  “Hey Buster, feeling better?” Gavin scooped a freshly showered Arlo onto his lap, and the child buried his face in his father’s neck.

  “Sara was just the same,” said her mother fondly, handing out cups of tea. “Do you remember, darling? You always used to get carsick when we went on holiday.”

  “I remember being sick once,” said Sara.

  “Oh, no, it used to happen a lot. That time we went up for Gail’s wedding, we’d only been in the car twenty minutes before you—”

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  “The key is to be prepared. I always kept a few plastic bags in the glove compartment—”

  “We had plastic bags.”

  “And you should have put him on newspaper if you knew he got carsick.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t, normally,” Lou said and Sara swivelled her head in disbelief.

  “But I suppose he’s used to our old jalopy, not a new car like yours. I think that syntheticky smell can be a bit… off-putting sometimes. And then, they’re so sort of hermetically sealed, aren’t they, proper cars? Not like our rust-bucket. We get a Force Ten gale blowing through it even with the windows shut.”

  Everyone smiled at the delightful eccentricity of Lou and Gavin’s car, with all its quirky disadvantages, which actually turned out (who knew?) to be hidden assets.

  “So, yes, it might have been the car,” she went on, “but, to be honest, I’m more inclined to suspect the late night.”

  Sara clutched the cushion on her lap, but before she could decide whether to hurl it at Lou or sink her teeth into it, Ezra’s face appeared round the door.

  “Pardon me, folks,” he said, “can somebody point me in the direction of the john?”

  Once Sara’s mother had learned that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Ezra was not, in fact, a vagrant from the Bronx who had fallen through a worm hole into this leafy Middlesex suburb, but an important writer – who, now she came to think of it, she had definitely heard interviewed on Radio 4 – Sara knew they would never get away.

  “It is ab-so-lutely no trouble whatsoever,” she insisted. “I’ve got a couple of home-made lasagnes in the freezer and to be honest, Sara, that car’s not going to be fit to drive for another hour at least. The sensible thing would be for you all to stay the night.”

  “Oh no, Mum, people need to get back,” Sara said quickly. “We’ll just eat and then get on our way.”

  It was amazing, she reflected, how her mother instinctively applied the techniques of Cold War realpolitik to parlay a quick cup of tea into supper. What was even more amazing was that everyone, Ezra included, seemed perfectly amenable to the plan.

  Sara tried to persuade her mother to serve the food in the kitchen, but she was having none of it. Instead, they ate in her mausoleum of a dining room, off a rosewood table cluttered with placemats and cruets and Waterford crystal.

  “Ezra?” said Sara’s mother, in a casual tone that could nevertheless not disguise a certain relish in the exoticism of the name. “Can I tempt you to some lasagne?”

  If Sara hadn’t been so fraught with nerves, she might have seen the funny side of her mother looming over this titan of literature, her sheer indomitability more than a match for his reputation. “I hope you’re not going to tell me you’re a vegetarian.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Ezra, watching appreciatively as she served him a generous portion. He seemed to be enjoying himself and Sara realised that, for him, this was a window onto a world he would otherwise never have seen. Just as, on a purely anthropological level, she’d have found it fascinating to dine with a bunch of God-fearing Texans on grits and red-eye gravy, so Ezra must, she supposed, be taking mental notes right now.

  For his part, Gavin seemed no less interested in making an opportunistic survey of middlebrow aesthetics. Watching him cast an appraising glance over the artworks displayed on the dining room walls, Sara flinched. It was hard to know which was more lamentable, the hotel-lobby blandness of her mother’s Impressionist prints, or the vulgarity of Richard’s original Jack Vettriano, hung in pride of place over the coal-effect gas fire. She met Gav’s eye, with a look in hers which, she hoped, conveyed an urbane amusement – an awareness that this was all beyond the pale, but must be tolerated, because, well, family was family.

  “I understand you’re a film director, Louise,” Sara’s mother said, unfurling a serviette with a flourish and sitting down at last.

  “Writer-director,” said Lou.

  “That must be interesting.”

  “Yes.” Lou seemed strangely reticent for once.

  “And when will we be able to see your latest offering?”

  “It’s not going to be coming to the Staines Odeon, Mum,” said Sara wearily.

  “Well, you know me, Sara,” said her mother, “I have been known to schlep into town if there’s culture in the offing.”

  Her mother’s unlikely recourse to Yiddish slang was almost as surreal as the idea of her making a cultural pilgrimage to the West End to catch an art-house short. Sara smiled to herself.

  “Oh, well, the UK release is a way off, anyhow,” Lou said vaguely and turned away to attend to Zuley. Sara felt a stirring of unease. Lou hadn’t mentioned Cuckoo the whole time they had been at Lush and, while it was typical of her to play her cards close to her chest, she would, surely, if she had secured the anticipated distribution deal, have wanted to share the good news with her investors.

  At the other end of the table, Caleb and Dash seemed to have struck up a rapport with Sara’s stepfather.

  “So tell me,” Sara heard Richard say, “who you saw at the pop concert.”

  “It’s called a music festival,” Caleb said kindly, “and we saw a few different bands.”

  “But who’s your favourite? I need to keep up with this stuff. I’ve got my grandsons visiting tomorrow.”

  “The Jeremiahs,” said Caleb.

  “Yeah, The Jeremiahs were sick,” agreed Dash.

  “Oh dear,” Richard stopped packing food neatly onto the back of his fork and looked up, “but they still performed, did they?”

  Dash and Caleb looked at each other, in delighted disbelief.

  “Yeah,” Dash said, seriously, “they still performed. They’re very professional The Jeremiahs. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the fans.”

  Caleb snorted with laughter and Sara frowned at him.

  “Maybe that’s where young fellow-me-lad picked it up,” Richard said, nodding towards Arlo, who was pushing lasagne miserably round his plate.

  “Could be,” agreed Dash seriously, “could be a bug going around.”

  This was too much for Caleb, who started to slide down his chair, clutching his belly in helpless mirth – or, Sara suspected, a simulation of it, calculated to flatter Dash. It was this, perhaps, her son’s sycophancy, even more than Dash’s slyness, or the meanness of the joke, that touched a nerve.

  “Dashiell!” Sara snapped, when he opened his mouth to compound the offence. He met her gaze, innocent as a choirboy. The buzz of conversation and the tinkling of cutlery stopped. Sara was aware of Lou’s eyes on her. She held Dash’s gaze for a moment longer and then buckled.

  “Would you pass me the bread, please?”

  He handed it across with exaggerated courtesy. There was a pause and then the clatter and chitchat resumed. Neil engaged Richard in a conversation about golf. Lou started gathering up the dirty plates and the boys helped themselves to bowls of trifle.

  “I’m so glad I read the book before I saw the film,” Sara’s mother was saying, an unlikely rapport with Ezra apparently having blossomed, whilst Sara’s attention was elsewhere.

  “What book’s that, Mum?” Sara inquired, queasily.

  “The Help. Ezra and I are discussing American literature. They didn’t do a bad job, but one never imagines the characters quite as they’re depicted onscreen. I suppose it must be even more frustrating if you
created them. Have you had your books adapted for the big screen, Ezra?”

  “No, ma’am,” replied Ezra, “I guess I don’t write that kind of book.”

  “Seriously, Ezra,” said Gavin, “has no one optioned Appalachia? I’m surprised. I’d liked to have seen what the Coen Brothers made of it.”

  “Nope,” Ezra shook his grizzled head regretfully. “My agent was in talks with Francis Ford Coppola’s people but it all fell apart. If the guy who made the greatest movie of all time says your book’s un-filmable, I guess you’re pretty much fucked.” Sara darted an anxious glance at her mother, but it seemed she was inclined to grant Ezra any amount of licence.

  “Godfather Two!” bellowed Richard from the other end of the table.

  Everyone turned and looked at him.

  “He’s forgotten to take his medication,” said Sara’s mother in an undertone.

  “Bang on the money!” Ezra bellowed back, pointing his knife. “Two every time. More nuanced than One; more heartfelt than Three. This guy knows his movies.”

  The trifle bowls were scraped clean and collected up. “Coffee” was served – a beverage so flavourless, as to make the much-maligned Rumbles Cappuccino seem like ambrosia. Soon, Sara told herself, soon she would be released from this purgatory and they could all go home. Emboldened from picking clean the carcass of Ezra’s celebrity, her mother had now moved on to Gavin. His name was ringing bells, she insisted, although she couldn’t claim to be completely au courant with modern art. Was it, by any chance, his work she had seen recently, gracing the courtyard of a Provençal Manoir in Country Living magazine? Gavin didn’t think so.

  “Never mind.” Sara’s mother leaned across the table and patted his wrist, as if her inability to bring to mind his oeuvre were indicative of his obscurity, rather than her ignorance, “You can explain it to me.” Sara wilted in shame, but Gavin didn’t seem to mind in the least.

  “I suppose you’d have to call it sculpture,” he said, “in that I produce three-dimensional figurative works, but I don’t like that label much because it locates my work in a tradition I don’t feel very comfortable in – monolithic, literally, set in stone – whereas, for me, art is mucking about; it’s childlike. The less you commit yourself to the idea of producing ‘great art’, the more chance there is you’re going to make something worthwhile. That’s why, until lately at least, I’ve worked with cheap materials – in plaster and wire. My finished works would be the start of the process for another sculptor – what they call maquettes.”

  “So, let me get this right, they’re white plaster statues?” Sara’s mother was pulling her level three Sudoku face.

  “Yes, figures really, more than statues, and not, generally, full-size. I tend to experiment with surface textures, so I’ll use found objects – broken glass or feathers, ring-pulls even, you know, off Coke cans? To dirty things up a bit.”

  “You like them dirty?”

  Sara’s mother’s synapses seemed about to short-circuit, and Sara could no longer contain herself.

  “Not everything needs to be nice, Mum,” she snapped. “What Gavin’s saying is that the medium reflects the meaning of the artwork. So, if it’s a human being writhing in torment, then it’s appropriate to give it jagged edges, or cancerous lumps and bumps because that conveys a feeling – makes an emotional connection with the viewer. And just because it’s, you know, difficult to dust, doesn’t invalidate it as art. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “I see,” said Sara’s mother, her eyes glinting with hurt. Sara looked defiantly around the table at the embarrassed faces of the other adults.

  “Well,” said Lou at last, with a conciliatory smile, “what a lovely evening.” She turned to Sara’s mother. “Thank you so much, Audrey, for your hospitality. I can’t believe you conjured that wonderful meal out of nowhere. We should probably get off now. Get these kids to bed.”

  22

  The house had a neglected air on their return, as though they had been away for longer than a weekend. Junk mail had rained onto the doormat, dust had gathered in the corners, the light bulb on the landing had blown. Sara scuttled about trying to breathe life back into the place, dumping dirty washing in the utility room, putting away the provisions they hadn’t used – the battered cereal boxes, a solitary bruised apple. She ran a bath for the boys and put hot water bottles in their beds. It seemed late in the year to be doing this, but there was a chill about the place.

  Later, in bed, Sara’s whisper echoed off the high ceiling.

  “I never thought I’d like camping.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “We should get our own tent.” She reached for Neil’s hand under the duvet.

  “Maybe.”

  She rolled towards him and insinuated her head into the crook of his arm. They lay in silence for a while.

  “That thing you did…” she murmured.

  “Mmmm?”

  “I liked it.”

  Neil cupped her breast, with the awkward condescension of someone donating small change to a good cause. She faked a little gasp, but his hand just lay there. Tracing her toe down his calf, she received a valedictory squeeze of the tit, before his hand slackened and his breathing started to deepen. When she was sure that he was either asleep, or so committed to faking it, as to have forfeited any right to object, she slipped her hand between her legs and brought herself, quietly and resentfully, to orgasm.

  The scent of his aftershave woke her – citrusy and sharp – he only wore it for work.

  “I’m going to get Steve Driscoll to look at that crack. I think it might be structural,” he said.

  Why are you telling me? she thought. What do I care?

  “Okay,” she mumbled and closed her eyes again.

  “Sara.”

  Shut up, she thought.

  “Sara?”

  “What?”

  “You said to make sure you were awake before I left. First day of term, yeah?”

  Sara felt her heart lift. She would get the boys off to school and spend the day emailing publishers.

  Then she remembered.

  “Yeah, I’m on it,” she said.

  She was not on it, not in the least. She felt daunted and dispirited by the task ahead, and then almost immediately, guilty for feeling that way, and then, more comfortably, more familiarly, resentful of Neil for prompting such feelings in the first place.

  ***

  “What’s in those?” said Patrick, running his eye along the row of colourful stacking boxes beneath the kitchen window, each one labelled for a different subject area.

  “Stuff for lessons,” said Sara, “books, equipment, quizzes…”

  Patrick brightened.

  “Can I do a quiz?” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to get dressed first?”

  “No.”

  It couldn’t hurt to let him stay in his pyjamas, Sara reasoned. Surely the whole point of home-schooling was to break down the boundaries between learning and life; keep things relaxed.

  “There you go,” she said putting a printed sheet in front of him. She flicked through her sheaf of papers and found an age-appropriate quiz for Caleb on the same topic. Caleb gave it a cursory glance, then, smiling at her beatifically, folded it into a paper aeroplane and launched it across the kitchen. It was the kind of thing Dash would have done, Sara thought – a deliberate provocation. She would not be provoked. She strolled over to where it had landed, picked it up and examined its construction.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  Caleb smirked unpleasantly, but before he could think of a comeback, the doorbell rang and he hurtled out of the kitchen to answer it.

  “God!” Lou walked in and gave Sara an absent-minded hug. “That woman!”

  “Who?” said Sara.

  “The childminder. I swear I’d have sacked her by now if I had anyone else to fall back on. She’s so blatant.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s so obvious she fancies Gav,” sai
d Lou. “I mean, big deal, on one level. She’s not the first.”

  Sara turned away and started filling the kettle.

  “But she doesn’t even try to disguise it. And she makes it pretty obvious she can’t stand me.”

  Seeing that Lou was in garrulous mood, the boys took the opportunity to drift away.

  “Maybe we should talk about this later?” Sara said.

  “Do you know what she said?” Lou sat down and took out a packet of cigarettes. “Sorry, just the one. You see, this is what she does to me.” She shook her head. “I’ll open the window. Mustn’t pollute the schoolroom!” She hauled up the sash.

  Sara glanced anxiously into the garden, where the boys had started kicking a ball about. Patrick was still in his pyjamas.

  “What did she say?” she asked Lou, filling the cafetière.

  “Well, she thinks she’s psychic – which is hilarious, considering how un-self-aware she is – and she’s got the cheek to tell me that Zuley’s aura’s out of whack.”

  Sara whirled one finger around her temple and went cross-eyed.

  “Oh no, auras are a thing,” Lou corrected her, “it’s just the idea that Mandy can see them. Anyone less likely to be endowed with the third eye, you cannot imagine.”

  “Right,” said Sara. It seemed like the safest response.

  “Apparently, when she first started looking after her, Zuley’s aura was lilac.” Lou laughed defensively and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Now it’s dirty grey.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  Sara glanced through the open window and saw Dash make a reckless tackle on Patrick.

  “Guys!” she called.

  “So Madam wonders if everything’s alright at home. ‘Is Zuley wetting the bed?’ for example. Er, no, she bloody isn’t. She’s been dry at night from the age of nine months.”

  “Wow!”

  “Arlo’s the bed-wetter, if anyone.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, I’m going to start looking around.”

  “For a new childminder?”

  “Yeah. She thinks she’s got me over a barrel, but Zuley’s very resilient. It’s a shame, at the end of the day, because she is happy there and she loves Sky to bits.”