But I took care of it, and he was happy when they came along. He wept in the delivery room after Lola’s birth, the problem of his age washed away in moments. He spoke of his new lease of life, his unexpected chance to be the father he wished he could have been the first time round.
He was stopping at two, though. There was no way he would consider having another one after Maggie. I still tried, though, now and then. The previous week, the council had placed an advert in the local paper, wanting decent people to act as foster carers for children waiting to be adopted. I’d read it out to Gus. ‘What do you think?’ I asked.
He said, ‘I think we’ve got enough on our plate without trying to save every abandoned child on the planet.’
‘It wouldn’t be every child. Just one or two at a time.’
He shook his head. ‘We’ve got our own children,’ he said simply. ‘We can’t risk harming them by disrupting their home for the sake of children who aren’t ours. Our concern has to be keeping our own girls safe and well.’
I let it go, for now. He thought I was mad, I knew that, and he was right in a way. This weakness of mine for the unloved … it was probably pathological. If I wanted, I could trace it to its roots, but there was no point looking backwards, picking over old memories. Much better to stay in the present.
I heard his footfall in the hallway and the latch on the kitchen door lifted. ‘Morning,’ he said.
The kitchen table was covered in manuscripts from the students I’d be teaching the following week. ‘Can I move some of these?’ he asked.
‘Just stick them on the floor. I’m taking them out to the car in a minute.’
‘You’re not going till Monday.’
‘I know, but they’re cluttering up the study.’
He flicked through one of the manuscripts, pausing to read the occasional paragraph. ‘Anything good this year?’ he said.
‘The usual,’ I told him. ‘Murders, drugs raids, dystopian worlds, a few feminist protests. But there’s one I love.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. Have a look through. Alice Dark.’
‘Is this it? “Last Words”.’
‘Yes.’
He read it quickly. ‘Well, that’s all pretty disturbing,’ he said.
I stood up beside him. ‘Yes, but it’s good. Can’t you see?’
‘It’s brutal.’
‘But there is so much anguish and pain in here; and longing. Endless longing for repair.’
He said nothing.
Ever since I’d first read it, I’d been thinking about Alice Dark’s work; it was rare that students moved me like this. I knew it had stirred up something that usually slumped deep inside me, in the place I didn’t like to visit. But I couldn’t help being intrigued. I loved the writing and wanted to meet the writer. Alice Dark was, I felt sure, young and vulnerable, and in need of care. I had the urge to reach out to her, to steer her to wellness.
I said, ‘I think the author is vulnerable.’
Gus smiled, ‘Another one of your waifs and strays,’ he said, indulgently, as though my habit of caring for the dispossessed was endearing. ‘Be careful this time.’
I sniffed and turned to the fridge. ‘Do you want lunch? I was going to use the last of the squash in a soup.’
‘I’m fine. I’ll grab something later.’
His routine was fixed. A morning spent reading books, then a sandwich in front of the local lunchtime news and an afternoon of brain-training games on the iPad. I mostly shut myself away in the study and worked, and we came together again in the evenings, for a meal and a glass of wine. That was the way we lived, now he was retired and the days were long and threw us together more than we’d ever been used to. It worked. It was what I needed. If he had made demands of me, I’d never have got anything done. Life was quiet and normal, and all I’d ever wanted.
At two-thirty, I set off to pick the girls up from school. Gus hadn’t brought the post in today. He usually went out for it straight after breakfast, then handed me the letters I needed and threw away anything he thought I wouldn’t cope with. I wasn’t sure what else he read, though I had some suspicions that certain things never reached me.
I paused by the tiny red mailbox standing on its post at the end of the drive and stooped to peer inside. In the darkness, I could make out three or four envelopes, though the print was impossible to read. I was still waiting for the contract for my new book. Perhaps he’d have taken it all in by the time I came home, I thought, and walked on.
I followed the waterfall trail. It took me across streams that fell over the rocky edges of the mountains, rushing down to the river that wound through the pastures below.
It wasn’t possible to be unhappy here. There was nothing ugly in nature. Human guilt was in the city: in the factories and all their dark fog; in the grey sky that fell into black rivers; in the smog and the damage.
The path took me under a yellow-green canopy of beech trees, where a waterfall raged and ancient boulders, green with moss, soaked up the spray. One of the reasons I’d wanted to move here was because walking like this took me, not just through the landscape around me, but along a path through my own mind. It was when I was walking that I could best think about my work and had all my ideas.
The canopy of beech trees opened out at the foot of the mountain. I stepped into the light and down the stone steps that took me into the village where the school stood. The yard was already full. I talked briefly to some of the other parents, keeping my eye out all the time for the girls’ teachers bringing their straggly lines of children out of the building.
Maggie came out first, in her red gingham dress with one sock to her knees and one round her ankles, weighed down by her book bag, her hair in her eyes. She saw me and waved, her face lit with a smile. I smiled back, then the teacher released her and she bounded over and threw herself at me. I returned her hug, took charge of the book bag, straightened her hair and pulled up her socks. ‘Good day?’ I asked.
Maggie wrinkled her nose. ‘Boring,’ she said. ‘We had to do our six times table and I hate it.’
‘They’re tricky, the sixes,’ I agreed with a smile.
Maggie took my hand, then we spotted Lola and the ritual was repeated.
They were always so pleased to see me, and the happiness it brought me was always tinged with regret, because how much longer would it go on like this? How many years could I hold on to them before I became just a drag: a tedious old woman who nagged about exam revision and wouldn’t let them go to Manchester nightclubs every Friday?
Still, I thought, as I nudged the book bags further on to my shoulder and took Lola’s hand in mine, they were here now and they were mine, and they were eight and six years old, and I’d brought them this far – happy, healthy, nurtured, secure.
I was not like my own mother. Not at all.
4
Alice
Sunday evening. I was in the bedroom packing. Jake lay on the mattress, headphones in, listening to something meaningful. My train was leaving Brighton at six the following morning, which meant the latest I could get up was 5:15. This was not a time I recognised, or at least not as a time to start the day. I might have passed through 5:15 as part of a late night once or twice, but other than that, the hour did not exist. The thought of it was painful and impossible. It would be easier, I decided, to stay up to greet it rather than go to bed at my usual time and set an alarm for three hours later.
Jake was going to a party. His friend, who owned an attic flat above a health food shop on Bond Street, always threw a party on Sunday nights. The anticapitalist tribal gathering, he called it. Fuck Mondays. Screw the job. Join the hedonist clan. Be happy. I’d been a few times and hated it. The music was too loud, the people too cool, the room filled with the smell of sweat and decaying youth. It was claustrophobic. I wanted to run away.
I’d invited Anna over to keep me company while I waited for morning to roll around. Anna was a police officer and kept unusual hours. She had
the next day off, and could go on drinking and talking till at least 2 am. I thought I might do some work in those last hours – carve out a few paragraphs to take with me to Northumberland, something I could finish when I was there.
Jake took his headphones off and sat up, ‘Are you nervous about the course?’ he asked.
I turned to face him. ‘A bit, maybe. No one wants to be the worst one, do they? I’m nervous about that – everyone else being better than me.’
‘They won’t be,’ he said.
‘I read somewhere that only old people do these courses. They all retire and then decide to flood the world with crap stories.’
Jake shrugged, ‘Then even if they’re better than you, you’ll still have the advantage – you’ll have loads more years to improve than they’ve got left.’
I sat down beside him on the mattress. ‘I know we’ve talked about this before, but when I get back from this course, I really want to think about moving out of Brighton. There are too many distractions here. Neither of us commits to anything properly. If we really want to be successful, we need to knuckle down and do it.’
‘Yeah. I know. Yeah.’
‘So you’ll move to the country with me?’
‘I need to be able to go to parties, though. I can’t work if I can’t go to parties and hear music. It helps my painting. You know there are links between my art and techno.’
I left it. This particular conversation only ever went in circles: I wanted to move somewhere remote, so I could work without distraction; he wanted to be in a town. I wanted to be successful and knew it involved commitment; he wanted to be successful and thought he could fit his working life into the nooks of crannies of the week. He loved parties and had to ransack the town to find one almost every night; I hated them and didn’t go with him, and couldn’t bear it when he came home at 6 am, still tripping so hard he thought I was a snake and beat me with a pillow. He thought I was uptight for not wanting to be woken up by someone on drugs at 6 am, beating me with a pillow…
‘When’s Anna coming over?’ he asked.
‘About eight.’
‘I’ll make sure I’m gone by then. I don’t want her to arrest me.’
‘She won’t arrest you.’
‘She’s a pig. She’ll arrest me if she sees what’s in my drawers.’
‘She’ll turn a blind eye.’
‘She won’t. They’re all the same, pigs. Power freaks. They love banging people up.’
‘Not all of them. Lots of them are decent. They protect people.’
‘They’re pigs,’ he said.
What he meant was that they were too mainstream for him, too busy imposing rules, and Jake was not someone who liked to live a life with rules. He was suspicious of anyone who cared so much about rules they actually wanted to be the one to bollock him for flouting them.
I said, ‘What are you going to do while I’m away?’
He looked at me blankly. ‘Just … you know, the usual. I’ll try and catch up with Adam while he’s in town, and maybe my brother. There’s a party on Tuesday night. Might go to the Joint on Wednesday. I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Just see how the week pans out, I suppose.’
Work didn’t feature in his plans, I noted. The commitment he’d said he had to becoming a world-class painter was looking more and more delusional.
I sighed, ‘Alright.’
He said, ‘I’ll try and paint something as well. Start something good. For that agent.’
‘Great,’ I said, without enthusiasm. I’d heard all this before.
The doorbell rang.
Jake looked alarmed. ‘It’s a pig,’ he said. ‘I’m going down the fire escape. See you later.’ He kissed me quickly on the mouth then climbed out of the window onto the flat roof outside his room and down the steps that led to the pavement.
Bye, Jake, I thought. See you in a week.
I ran downstairs and opened the front door. Anna stood there in black skinny jeans, a bright-pink halterneck and leather jacket.
‘Wow,’ I said, looking at her admiringly. ‘If I were criminally inclined, I’d commit robbery just so I could be locked up in an interview room with you.’
‘Thanks, love,’ Anna said, stepping inside and handing me a bottle of wine. ‘What time are you off?’
‘Five.’
‘Great. Loads of time.’
She sat down on the sofa. I filled a bowl with some Kettle Chips, poured two glasses of red wine and joined her. There was a moment’s silence while we both lit cigarettes, then Anna said, ‘So what’s new? What’s this course you’re doing?’
‘It’s a writing course,’ I told her. ‘It’s run by an author. I think we write stuff and she tells us how to make it better. Maybe. I don’t know exactly what it will involve, but I’ve decided it’s going to change my life. It’ll be the crucial pivot – the thing that transforms me from Alice the waster to Alice the brilliant, committed author. Definitely, it will do this.’
‘Great. I hope you become the Beyoncé of the literary world,’ Anna said. ‘How’s Jake?’
I sighed. ‘Like he’s always been.’
‘Which is what, exactly?’
‘Sweet, lovely, a dreamer, but utterly useless at life.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Completely sure.’
‘So…’
‘Let’s drink instead of talk about this. I was mean. He’s not completely useless. He has talent and a good heart.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘At an anticapitalist, fuck-Monday-mornings party.’
‘What a revolutionary. He’ll change the world with that sort of protest.’
‘You never know.’
I sat back and inhaled on my cigarette. I’d known Anna since we were at York together. She’d started as a mature student, twenty-six instead of eighteen. She’d joined the police force straight after school, despite acing her A levels, but then she’d wanted to try out university. She left at the end of the first year. ‘Oh, it’s alright for some people,’ she’d said, ‘but really, what’s the point in it? What’s the point in writing all these essays on fairies in Shakespeare, when I could be protecting women from domestic abuse and getting paedophiles locked up?’ So she’d got a new job with Sussex Police. After I graduated and all my friends had returned to live with their parents, I’d lodged in her spare room for a while and paid her in homemade cake.
Now, Anna looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet a rich writer on this course.’
‘I don’t think writers are rich, in general.’
‘Some must be. J.K Rowling. She’s loaded.’
‘I don’t think she has much need to do Advanced Fiction Writing.’
‘You could have an affair with the tutor. He’ll be rich.’
‘It’s a woman. Bo Luxton.’
Anna looked blank. ‘Oh. Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about Jake but if you’re worried about money – I mean, if that’s what’s keeping you here and you need to get out – you can always come and stay with me again. It’s no problem. I won’t ask for any rent for the first three months. You’ll need a job, though.’
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘Not a proper one. Not one that pays you enough money to leave your boyfriend. Everyone needs enough money to go it alone if they have to. Seriously. Everyone.’
‘Oh, you’re so wise, Anna. Please have another drink so it can be knocked out of you.’
We changed the subject and went on talking, drinking and smoking until after midnight, when Anna stood up to leave.
‘Enjoy the course,’ she said. ‘Come back a bestselling author. Buy a house.’
‘OK.’
After she’d gone, I busied myself making notes, jotting down images and phrases I liked. This was my trouble. I was full of observations and occasional sentences – but never enough to fill a book, and I had no ideas for plot. I was only twenty-six. I hadn’t lived yet. All I’d really experienced was the death of
my mother, and I could immediately think of at least ten other books about the death of someone’s mother. It wasn’t a subject that could be easily made new.
Time ticked on. I was tired and mildly pissed, but excited. I looked over my notes. They were a jumble, nothing that could easily be turned into anything substantial, but they were there – the first stirrings of something. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen now, but I had an absolute, deep-soul certainty that my life was about to change. I was on the cusp of something; something important and new.
5
Bo
I’d never been to Northumberland before. When we’d lived in Oxford and I couldn’t face the stress of taking young children for holidays in the sun – all that threat of burned skin, diseased mosquitoes, bad plumbing – we’d abandoned the crowds heading to the West Country and come north instead, to the Yorkshire coast, the Dales, or the Lakes, but Northumberland was off my radar. If I thought about it at all, it was in terms of a history that didn’t interest me: Roman armies, an old stone wall, digging up the earth and getting excited about ancient pots and toilet seats. And cold. Northumberland was cold.
What struck me most now was the emptiness. I’d left the fast roads behind me at a village called Wall, then driven for miles through a landscape of rolling heath, marked here and there with crags and castle ruins, until I reached the rocky wildness of the coast beyond. This was dramatic and beautiful country, deserted.
The house stood three miles outside Warkworth. I found it easily enough: a sixteenth-century manor, approached by a long, uneven drive, pocked with potholes and interrupted by cattle grids, and with acres of land, a private lake and wide-open views of the sea.
It was run by a young couple. They took bookings, changed the bed linen and smiled at everyone they saw, whether they wanted to or not. As soon as I pulled up in the gravel car port, the man of the pair appeared.
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