by Clare Boyd
Two
Elizabeth Huxley pulled her turtleneck high to her jawline to make sure her throat was hidden. The ribs of cashmere pressed into her skin like wire. The day was too warm for wool of any kind, but she was fed up of covering her bruises with her cotton scarf. The light material needed constant attention when it unravelled or flapped or tangled.
In the kitchen, Agata was clearing away the children’s cereal bowls. When she saw Elizabeth, she handed her a stack of letters. She had sifted out Lucas’s mail, leaving Elizabeth with catalogues, charity leaflets, free local magazines and, of course, Lucas’s instructions for the day. Today there was also one large white envelope that was addressed to both Mr and Mrs Lucas Huxley. Elizabeth pulled it out.
It had already been opened. There were two Post-it notes stuck to it. Lucas had scribbled on one in his looping cursive, Have a think, darling, referring she assumed to the contents. She put the envelope and the other letters down on the worktop. She would have to eat something before tackling what she knew was in it.
‘Lucas didn’t eat his grapefruit?’ she asked Agata, seeing it still in the fridge.
‘I made him some …’ Agata pointed at the jar of her home-made granola, which sat in an exact line of identical jars filled with pasta or oatmeal or rice.
‘Ah.’ The sound stuck in her throat. She would have said thank you, for being kind, but talking made it sore. A glass of water soothed it.
‘Grapefruit is, you know …’ Agata mimed a thumbs-down and sucked in her cheeks to suggest malnutrition. ‘We need muscle,’ she smiled, squeezing her small bicep, which flexed when she reached for the granola.
Elizabeth smiled. ‘I don’t want muscles,’ she said, sitting down with her grapefruit at the breakfast bar.
Agata was on the other side of the long bank of kitchen units, shooting up and down the narrow space, unloading the dishwasher, polishing glasses, tidying the fridge. The girl’s pencil-thin ponytail cut through the air, left to right, right to left, as she dashed around in her clean white trainers and high-waisted jeans. The squeak of her rubber soles on the concrete floor was grating. Elizabeth wanted to tell her to stop moving, but knew it wasn’t normal to ask such a thing. It’s such an effort to be normal, she thought.
Slowly she picked through the segments of grapefruit. Each cold slice as painful to swallow as the last.
The breakfast bar separated the two of them. It should have been appropriate, as though Elizabeth were sitting behind an executive desk: a boss in charge of her employee. But it didn’t feel right in a domestic setting, in her own home. Being a boss had never felt right to Elizabeth. It didn’t suit her temperament. And she had grown fond of Agata.
She studied the girl, assessing her skin tone and physique for signs of health and vitality, just as she would scrutinise Isla and Hugo’s lithe, naked little bodies before bath time or around the pool. She tried hard to be dispassionate, like an MRI scanning her for anomalies. She noted the sallowness of Agata’s olive skin, with a breakout of spots on her chin, and the ever-growing strip of dark brown at the roots of her hair, even thinner at her hairline than at the brittle, bottle-blonde tips. Under her brown eyes, which were pretty but too close to her nose, were dark hollows, pockets of emptiness. The accumulation of poor sleep was becoming obvious. With a shabby, useless sort of guilt, Elizabeth wondered what she should do about it. She played with the segment of grapefruit in her bowl, allowing it to slip and slide off her fork.
‘Where are Isla and Hugo?’ she asked, noting their empty cereal bowls.
Agata snapped a glass jar shut. The sudden noise made Elizabeth jump.
The girl pointed left. ‘They play …’
Elizabeth smiled at the thought of her two children playing happily together.
On cue, there was a thundering of feet and they exploded out of the corridor that led from their bedrooms.
‘Hugo hit me!’ Isla wailed.
‘She cheated, Mummy!’ Hugo retorted.
‘Stop fighting, you two,’ Elizabeth said calmly.
‘But MUM!’ they both protested at once.
Elizabeth turned back to the hard work of her grapefruit. ‘Not interested.’
‘Let’s go. Mummy doesn’t care,’ Isla whispered to Hugo, rummaging in Elizabeth’s handbag for a handful of sweets. Elizabeth pretended not to notice. Isla’s words stung, but she smiled when Agata winked at her. It had been Agata’s advice to disengage from their fighting, to not take sides. The idea of not seeking justice for one or the other of her children, of not finding a victim or a perpetrator, had been a new approach, different to her husband’s need to pin down the culprit. It took willpower to stay seated, to resist seeking Isla out to kiss her face, to give her another handful of sweeties, to remind her she always cared.
‘Lucas say to meet you at five o’clock today in …’ said Agata, pointing out of the window towards the outbuilding in the garden. The mossy tiles and tumbledown brick of the old barn was the only blip on the horizon of their expansive sightline across the Surrey Hills.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ Elizabeth murmured, pushing her half-finished breakfast away.
‘And these, yes?’ Agata’s eyes were on her as she pushed the stack of post in front of her.
Elizabeth focused on the white envelope. On the second Post-it, Lucas had written, Just a little reminder to call Bo Seacart about the summer party! She removed both sticky notes and put them aside. The postmark on the envelope was a red shield with Channing House School written across it. Her stomach flipped. She handed the junk mail to Agata. ‘Bin these, will you?’ Agata dried her hands on the dishcloth and took them.
Gingerly Elizabeth opened the envelope and pulled out a school prospectus and a letter. It read:
Channing House School for Girls
Tilford Road
Hambledown
Hampshire
HO27 2NS
Dear Mr and Mrs Huxley,
* * *
We are very pleased to inform you that we have found Isla a last-minute place in our Junior House, commencing in September 2020, following her academic assessment and interview last month.
As discussed over the phone, I have included details of our ‘sleepover weekend’ in July of this year, to which Isla is warmly invited. This is highly recommended for our prospective young boarders, but not compulsory. These weekends are designed to be a fun and educational experience for the children. They enable us to build an all-round picture of your child academically and socially in preparation for her start next term. It will also be an important opportunity for your child to get a feel for Channing House, to meet fellow students and find her way around our grounds.
We require you to confirm Isla’s place and fill out the attached medical form and send it back to us as soon as possible. If there are any questions, please don’t hesitate to call.
We very much look forward to welcoming you both on our open day on Friday 5 June.
* * *
With best wishes,
* * *
Mrs Anne Hepburn
* * *
Headmistress, Channing House School
Elizabeth dipped into her handbag and stuffed two fruit sours in her mouth. She chewed slowly. Her gums smarted and her throat ached. She stared at the laughing faces of the young students in the glossy prospectus: playing hockey, playing tennis, studying hard at desks, laughing by the fire, sitting cross-legged on their duvets reading books in their bright little dormitories. She tensed at the thought of Isla in one of those pine bunk beds. Who would comfort her in the night if she had a nightmare? Perhaps it would be a housemistress with a towelling dressing gown and an unfamiliar face-cream smell. Or the eight-year-old girl in the top bunk whose tears had dried already. Or nobody. Maybe nobody would come to pull her covers over her and kiss her on the forehead.
She wanted to scribble a Post-it back to Lucas: PLEASE NO! NO! NO!
She left the letter on the side, then ambled over to the bank of glass walls and
leant her shoulder against the chilly, trunk-like concrete post that had been the architect’s nod to brutalism. Too brutal for Elizabeth’s tastes.
‘Could I have a hot lemon this morning, please?’ she asked Agata.
While Agata boiled the kettle and sliced the lemon, Elizabeth looked out. From this position, she had the feeling that their house was crouching, lying low in the landscape, hiding behind the tall, sparsely placed oak and birch trees. The edges of the patinated copper roof at the top of the windows sliced off the sky and the slate tiles of the patio, laid across the concrete foundations, sucked up the natural sunlight. The thick, dark mahogany doors weighed down the doorways either side of their open-plan kitchen-diner.
Last year, when the build had been finished, Lucas had taken Isla and Hugo to see it before they moved in. Isla, only six years old at the time, had mistaken the roof for gold. In spite of the green oxidation that covered it now, both Isla and Hugo continued to describe it as a golden house, but Elizabeth could only see the tarnish.
How arduous and expensive the process of building a house had been. The day the floor-to-ceiling glass panels had arrived on site to the wrong specification, three centimetres out. The week it had snowed, preventing the concrete being pumped into the floor, delaying the rest of the build, costing them more money, meaning they were unable to afford to renovate the pool, tennis court and barn. The day they had found a crack in the concrete posts.
She couldn’t help grieving for Lucas’s parents’ bungalow, which they had razed to the ground. It had been his childhood home, stuffed full of life and memories. Its replacement, this upmarket single-storey showpiece of glass and concrete and copper, was, to Elizabeth, a money pit that reflected their architect’s talents and her husband’s insecurities. But Lucas would call her a philistine. He would laugh about her being unambitious and she would not be able to deny it. Her mother had said the same about her. Yet their disappointments in her were idealistically opposed.
Elizabeth’s mother, Virginia, with her perfect diction and layers of uneven hemlines, had taught both Elizabeth and her brother Jude that being poor was noble. In her mother’s eyes, living for the theatre – living in poverty – was proof of her authenticity and integrity as an actor, or a voice coach, as she later became. In Elizabeth’s eyes, being poor meant scrabbling under sofa cushions for bus fares and shoplifting nail polish from Boots.
Looking around her now, she still couldn’t believe what she had. Never would she forget what she hadn’t had. The ex-council flat in the high-rise in Ladbroke Grove where she had grown up had been warm, most of the time, but the lift to the fifteenth floor had smelt of urine and had broken down every week. Elizabeth had had school shoes that fitted, but she had worn the same jumper and jeans outside of school for so long her friends had begun to notice. One year, for a whole term, they had eaten baked beans on toast for their supper every night, sharing one can between three. If they ever went out to eat, others paid. While Elizabeth’s father came and went as he pleased – as an actor himself – her mother paid the rent and survived on her own, her pride steeped in martyrdom and melodrama.
Lucas had represented the antidote to this gentrified struggle. They had met at a house party thrown by a mutual friend who was at SOAS with Lucas. Clutching warm wine in a plastic cup, transfixed by his handsome face, Elizabeth had struggled to hear him over the tinny nineties hip hop, but she had understood enough to know he had strong, old-fashioned values. He was a man who believed in the traditional family. A man who promised to take care of the woman he married. A man whose ambitions included a well-paid career and a family to provide for. A man who had been unapologetically clear about what he wanted, which had become – on that very night – what Elizabeth wanted too. The job her mother had found for her, working in a kiosk at the Barbican, had not suited her. A career in the arts had not been what she had dreamed of. She had not been passionate and motivated like Virginia. But at that party, she had found a man with enough of both for all three of them.
* * *
Later, after a day of doing very little, she put her book on the coffee table and thought of the letter that she had stuffed into the drawer. Her fingers reached around her neck and pressed on the bruises. The dull answering pain was a comfort. The bleak days of last week moved inside her again. If she lost her daughter to that school, she would only have herself to blame.
From her place on the sofa, she could see the blanket of green fields rolling out to the horizon. From afar, the terrain looked flat and the horizon reachable, as though you could walk there in an old pair of trainers, with no possessions, as though the world around them was accessible to all. Yes, she was free at any point to walk out of the door, hand in hand with Isla and Hugo, and across the horizon. But where would she walk to? What would she do? She looked out, further away, stretching her sight. Through the hazy blur of the horizon, the earth slid down, down, away to the unknown, where human feet were walking through their lives, anonymous and unfamiliar to her, busy and full of purpose. She couldn’t imagine that any of them were struggling, like her, with the pointlessness of it all. Quickly she wound up her thoughts, running them back up and over the horizon to the safety of her home, to her garden, where she loved to spend time with her children.
But Isla was going to be taken away from here, from her home, by a housemistress in a sensible skirt. Isla was her firstborn, her baby with the funny blonde curls either side of her big cheeks. And Copper Lodge was her place of security. Every day, Elizabeth wanted to see her running around, wild and uninhibited. Every single night, she wanted to make sure her warm little body was snuggled into her pink Pusheen bed in her own room. Every morning, she wanted her to wake up with a kiss from her mummy. Every single day of her precious childhood, Elizabeth wanted her here with her in the proverbial four walls of family life.
‘Agata, hand me that letter from Channing House, will you?’ she said with purpose. And she took the white envelope, tore it up and stuffed it in the bin.
In that euphoric moment, she didn’t care one bit how Lucas would react. Not one bit.
‘Elizabeth, please, you must go. He said five o’clock,’ Agata urged, almost pushing her outside.
Her heart sped up as she watched Lucas’s approach in the distance. She had been instructed to meet him at the barn at five. It was six minutes past. He was coming to find her.
Three
Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour journey up to north Surrey, I let a stream of old footage of the good times with my father play out in my mind. The smell of wet wool as he carried me over bogs on our long hikes; the taste of the pies we would eat together in front of the rugby on Saturday afternoons; the feel of his huge hand on my forehead when I was ill; the sound of his singing in the two-inch-deep bath on Sunday mornings.
Having arrived in Cobham three hours and twenty minutes late, due to Reese’s hot chocolate and a traffic jam, I did not feel hopeful about his mood.
Winding up Bunch Lane, I slowed down as I passed Copper Lodge, but as always, I could only get a flash of glass through the trees. It was set back too far from the road to see properly.
I drove into Connolly Close next door. My father’s white van was parked up outside their red-brick bungalow. The house, and five others exactly like it, had sprung up on the wooded strip of land next to the Huxleys’ plot in 1981, when Huxley Senior had changed the boundaries and sold it to crooked developers. The local residents, some of whom were still alive, had never recovered from the loss of the rare slow-worms and the lesser-spotted woodpecker; nor could they pass the estate without a sniff of disdain about the ugliness of the architecture.
I blew out a shot of air, releasing some of the dread, readying myself to go in; then I remembered my hair was down. Quickly I pulled a band out of my pocket and wrapped it into a bun. Dad did not approve of my long hair, which my mother had never let me cut. It was one of the few battles she had won. It had been prettier when I was young. It should have been auburn, but was
now tinged green from its overexposure to chlorine. In spite of its length, it needed very little maintenance. A weekly brush in the shower with some conditioner was enough of a fuss for me. I should have cut it shorter. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t. Maybe I kept it long for Mum. The rest of me I ignored almost completely: a flannel, a toothbrush, a pot of cheap face cream and a Vaseline lip salve was all I needed. There was a stub of an eyeliner pencil embedded in the lining of a wash bag somewhere, and an old dried-up mascara, but they were never used.
I pulled my suitcase out of the boot and wondered if Dad had waited to eat, in spite of his warnings that there would be no food for me if I wasn’t on time. Seven sharp was teatime.
‘Dad?’ I called out as I walked in.
His huge form emerged from the kitchen and approached me for what was neither a kiss nor a hug, but more of a touching of shoulders, our toes far apart from each other. I sucked in his familiar smell and held onto him for longer than he wanted me to.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said. Now that I was working for the family business, right where he had always wanted me, maybe he would let it go.
He scrutinised the wall clock above our heads. I had missed his strong face, his square jaw and his endearing ears, which stuck out a little, too small for his large head.
‘I was late too, as it happens. Mr Huxley wanted me to look at that damned tennis ball machine,’ he said.
‘Is that what gardeners do these days?’
‘It’s what gardeners do at Copper Lodge.’
I followed him into the kitchen. The usual rush of cleaning fluid and mothballs wasn’t there. The house smelt of cooking and damp wool. I looked out for old pizza boxes, empty beer bottles or squished-out cigars, anything to suggest that he hadn’t been coping without Mum. Aside from a cable-knit jumper dripping from a radiator, the room was clean and tidy. There was nothing sinister to the naked eye.
