They wouldn’t get back to that – not now; but nor would they founder. Even as she had lain sobbing in the bed, she had known, in some cool, rational chamber of her brain that they were not finished, her and Neil.
But she hadn’t known it would be this hard. The easy, elegant dance of their marriage, to which Sara had not even had to learn the steps, had turned into a weary, ill-coordinated shuffle. Long after Sara had moved back home, after a fortnight spent spaced-out on Diazepam at her mother’s; long after relationship counselling had supposedly put her and Neil back on track, they were still attempting to conceal their mutual resentment in a pastiche of cooperation.
“That thing’s on at nine o’clock,” a typical exchange might go, “but never mind if you’re watching the football.”
“Turn over then, go on.”
“Not if you’re watching. I mean, it’s nil–nil, and they’re not even teams you care about, but if you’re watching…”
“I said, turn over. I’m not bothered.”
“No, forget it, I’ve missed the beginning now.”
At this point, Neil would get up and leave the room, and Sara would sit, stubborn and miserable, in front of the football. And that was on a good day.
To say it had been a relief to leave London was an understatement, even if it had been a decisive move down in the world. Everything about the Hastings house was a compromise: Hastings itself, by dint of not being Brighton; the location of the house; in the old town, but not on one of its favoured streets; the lack of a seaview, unless you stood on a chair and opened the velux in the attic. But the biggest comedown had been the house itself. The need for a fourth bedroom had militated in favour of Sea Crest, a former B&B in an undistinguished Victorian terrace. Its pebbledashed frontage, high-gloss, sky-blue paintwork, and front wall of latticed concrete bricks hinted at the reason for its demise. Inside and out, it was a temple of kitsch, which would have appalled Carol as much as it would no doubt have delighted Gavin and Lou. And it was a measure of the lingering power of her old adversaries’ unconventional aesthetic that Sara actually considered, for about five minutes, retaining the mirror-backed 1980s bar in the front room. And yet the house did not depress her. She supposed, at some point, they would get around to stripping it back to its constituent parts, knocking down a few interior walls, revealing whatever period treasures might be hidden behind its stud-partitions and built-in wardrobes, but she was in no hurry. There was something very restful about living with other people’s choices. God knows Sara had made enough bad ones of her own, though not, perhaps, chiefly in the area of interior décor.
At any rate, as she tossed the plastic-swathed dog turd into a rubbish bin, and crossed the road towards her own front gate, it felt, for the first time, a bit like coming home. The postman had been, and after she had closed the porch door and unclipped the dog’s lead, Sara tugged a bulky A4 envelope from the over-sprung letterbox, prompting a cascade of smaller items onto the doormat. The main event turned out to be Neil’s copy of Inside Housing, which, Sara noted, he’d had redirected to Sea Crest, despite being on probation as a permanent resident. This, she found, didn’t annoy her as much as she might have expected. She flicked through the rest of the post – car insurance reminders, junk mail, several unimportant looking missives for the former residents – and was about to toss them into the recycling, when she came across an ivory-coloured envelope, hand-addressed to her and Neil.
28
“I just think they might have considered us, that’s all,” Sara said, accelerating into the overtaking lane, with the recklessness of one who has been stuck behind a Honda for twelve miles of single carriageway. “They could have hired somewhere. It’s not as if they’re short of money.”
“I think they’re entitled to have a party at their own house,” said Neil mildly. And Sara had to acknowledge that they were. All the same, it wasn’t going to be easy, standing in Carol and Simon’s front room, looking across at Lou and Gavin’s place. She hoped that she’d been right to accept the invitation. It had felt right. It had felt about time. Either they wiped their past life from the record, stopped sending Christmas cards, ceased the sporadic phone calls, discouraged the boys’ occasional trips down memory lane; or they brazened it out. By making this strategic visit, Sara hoped to cauterise the wound. She had, of course, first established that Lou and Gavin were not going to be at the party. There was cauterising the wound and there was self-immolation.
Even so, as the car began to navigate its own way along the last few familiar streets, she found herself feeling both teary and slightly nauseous.
“The Glovers’ extension’s finally finished,” said Neil, peering with great curiosity through the passenger window, “looks all right, actually. And those people next door to Marlene have cleaned up their act,” he went on, “she must have got on to the council.” He continued to provide a running commentary on the superficial differences he was able to discern between the street now, and the street as they had left it, apparently impervious to Sara’s brooding silence, right up until the moment she stopped the car.
“Okay,” Neil slapped his thighs, a little too heartily, “let’s do this thang.” He made to open the passenger door.
“Are you coming?” he said, but Sara kept hold of the steering wheel as if it were a life raft. Objectively, the suburban Victorian street resembled a hundred others, yet, attuned as she was to the these paving stones, these hedges, these bricks, the atmosphere of belonging, of identification, seemed to rush through the air vents like ozone. Here was the National Trust green of Carol’s front door, here the dent in the lamppost made when Neil had reversed too hastily en route to the labour ward. The failing light, the glowering privet, the sheen of drizzle on the wheelie bins, all brought a sense of nostalgia almost too intense to bear.
Neil bounded up Carol and Simon’s steps and rapped smartly on the door.
Under cover of reaching behind her seat for Simon’s present, Sara snatched a glance across the road. Their house was hidden behind scaffolding, halfway, no doubt, to being turned into three ‘generously-sized apartments.’ Lou and Gavin’s on the other hand looked more or less the same except for a rusty hunk of metal in the front garden, which she took to be a sculpture. It didn’t look like one of Gav’s.
“Sara! About time too.”
Carol’s middle class drawl made her wince with equal parts pleasure and embarrassment. She backed out of the car and found herself engulfed in Must de Cartier and cashmere.
“Hello,” she said, her voice cracking a little.
“Don’t you dare!” Carol gripped her by the shoulders, so that it hurt. “Don’t you dare stay away so long again.”
They had tea at Carol’s scrubbed-oak kitchen table and Simon got in trouble for not using the strainer. Sara had forgotten the pleasures of small talk; the layers of familiarity, going back ten years – the broad consensus on where was worth holidaying, what was worth reading, what one might aspire to for one’s children. It was a game, really, a bonding ritual – they might as well have been dingos or orangutans. She wondered, in retrospect, how she had managed to get so worked up about it all – how she had become, overnight, so desperate to define herself as “other”. Of course Carol still indulged in one-upmanship and Simon could bore for England on the subject of ethical investment, but they were funnier, more self-deprecating, wiser than she remembered. Simon’s brother turned up with his wife and they had another pot of tea and chatted about how the south coast was on the up, and the smart money was now on Margate and although some snarky things were said about Tracey Emin, that would once have raised Sara’s hackles, she found the whole experience far more congenial than she’d expected.
Other guests began to arrive in dribs and drabs, the tea things were cleared away and someone handed Sara a glass of champagne. They moved through to the living room, where Reggatta de Blanc was playing through the iPod speakers and Carol had set up a slideshow of Simon’s life in photographs, which turned o
ut to be an excellent ice-breaker. She stood next to one of Simon’s colleagues, and they nudged each other and smiled as the story unfolded: Simon wearing a nappy and a bashful smile; Simon at Cub Scouts, minus his two front teeth; Simon wearing a dodgy beret and brandishing a ticket for the Blow Monkeys; Simon leading Carol through a shower of confetti, looking like the cat that got the cream; Simon in red braces and a truly misjudged pair of 1990s spectacles. The carousel went on, each image a staging post in a fortunate, but otherwise unremarkable life; a life not dissimilar to Sara’s own, except that where Simon had accepted his privilege with good grace, Sara had chafed against hers; where Simon had cheerfully borne the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood as if they themselves were creative challenges, Sara had felt constrained by them; where Simon had never doubted his individuality enough to bother asserting it, she had come within a whisker of throwing over her whole life, in order to prove hers.
Since the move, Sara’s writing had got better. It was the only thing that had kept her sane to begin with, apart from the dog-walking. She had abandoned her novel, which, in retrospect, she was very glad Ezra hadn’t got round to reading and had been honing her skills on short stories instead. She had even had one short-listed for inclusion in a small anthology. It hadn’t made the final cut, but it had given her hope.
The slide show was on its second circuit now and she had run out of small talk, so with an apologetic waggle of her empty glass, she drifted away.
Seen from Carol’s well-appointed living room, Lou and Gavin’s house, while still projecting an air of otherness, looked dilapidated. Nearly three years on and they still hadn’t painted the window frames. The lavender border that she had planted herself, years ago, to mark the boundary between the two properties, was leggy and sparse. It had the look of razor wire. If only it had been, she thought. If only she had known to defend herself against their incursions, instead of inviting them in, to run amok.
She had been so naïve, so easily impressed and all too ready to take their failings for strengths. She had mistaken the physical neglect of their house for some kind of aesthetic statement and worried that, by comparison, her own place looked shiny and shallow. Even when Lou had praised her home-making skills, she had scented condescension. Only now could she see that the compliment had been genuine, that for Lou, “home” was as theoretical a word as “studio” was to Sara. It wasn’t, she could now see, that Lou and Gavin meant to be neglectful and exploitative, they had just bitten off more than they could chew. Their art came first – before their house, before their children, before their friends, maybe even before their marriage. Perhaps there was something noble in that, after all.
Turning her attention back to the party, she noticed Neil watching her pensively from the other side of the room. He met her gaze with a slightly rueful smile and, reaching for his drink, seemed intent on joining her but before he could, Carol ushered in a bevy of new guests.
“Hi Sara, how are you?” Toby Warricker was an acquaintance from Cranmer Road days. Carol and Simon had been very thick with him and his wife Alyson, who was even now bearing down on a beleaguered-looking Neil.
“Hi Toby,” she said, “how are things?”
“Yeah, fucking good actually. I suppose you’ve heard I’ve set up my own production company? Only way to go, these days, unless you want to spend your life filming tedious middle Englanders ‘escaping to the country’.” He held up his hand. “No offence, by the way.”
“None taken,” Sara replied, doubtfully.
“How’s that going by the way?”
“Hastings?” she said. “Yeah, very well. We like it. Neil’s always wanted to live by the sea.”
“Made Al a bit restless, you going,” Toby said.
“Really?” Sara was surprised. The nearest she and Alyson had come to friendship, had been running the lucky dip together at Cranmer Road’s Christmas Fayre.
“Yeah, you know how it is,” Toby shook his head, “someone’s kid gets mugged at the bus stop and the next thing you know everyone’s upping sticks. First it was Matt and Jude, then you guys. Doesn’t worry me, but Al’s very susceptible.”
Toby droned on. Sara’s gaze drifted toward the window. It was dark outside now, and she could see her own reflection superimposed like a hologram on the house across the road. Their curtains were half closed but the cold blue flicker of the TV could just be seen. She imagined Gavin lounging in the Eames chair with a glass of red, Lou lolling barefoot on the sofa. They might be watching an art-house movie together – or perhaps just slumming it with Saturday night telly. It was all too easy to conjure – the flea-bitten hearth-rug, the aroma of Pinot Noir mingled with woodsmoke. Even after everything that had happened, the scene still had its allure.
From their vantage point, Carol’s place would be a goldfish bowl – blinds open, lights blazing, a room full of people and more arriving. Sara hoped they had noticed. She hoped their exclusion would hurt, but she doubted it. Her focus shifted, once again, to her own face, a ghostly smudge in the sheen of the windowpane.
“… But it’s just a one-off and that’s what people need to realise.” Toby was smiling at her, with barely disguised impatience and she realised, with a flush of embarrassment that she had not taken in a word he had said.
“Hello!” He leaned forward and made as if to rap her on the forehead with his knuckles.
“Anybody home?”
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the members of Clifton Hill Writers’ Group, Melbourne, for their constructive criticism of early drafts, especially to Trish Bolton; to Polly Jameson for her editorial input and encouragement; to Sallyanne Sweeney at MMB Creative for her continuing support and to Kate Mills at HarperCollins for getting it. Above all, thanks to Adam Goulcher for being first reader, unsparing critic, and empowering friend.
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Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Felicity Everett 2017
Felicity Everett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008216900
The People at Number 9 Page 24
