Jill had come wearing her winter coat, because it was easier than carrying it; the coat was too thick for the cloudy, mild spring day, and her cheeks were hectic with the heat. Now she shrugged it off and dropped it on a chair in the hall, strode through the house and out through the French windows, into the garden where she threw herself down, flat on her back on the lawn: the earth’s deep chill seeped up through her dress, refreshing her. For a moment it was as if she was still seventeen, and had never left. Then the baby toddled after her and settled crowing with triumph astride her, bouncing until Jill groaned and pushed her off, lifted the little top of her romper suit printed with strawberries and blew noises on her tummy.
Her mother asked Jill carefully, over their cup of tea, where Tom was.
— Oh, he’s in Paris. He’s revolting.
For once Sophy’s irony failed her. — Revolting?
— You know. Isn’t that what revolutionaries do: revolt?
— Well, goodness. I hope he isn’t getting into trouble.
— That’s the whole point of a revolution, Mum, Jill said. — Trouble is what you’re hoping for. Anyway, Tom’s hoping for it, so he can write about it for his paper.
Evasive, not commenting, Sophy stirred the tea in her cup, chinking the spoon against the porcelain. Her doubts about Tom, transparent to her daughter, mostly went unspoken. — I’ll be so interested to hear what he thinks. I don’t know what to make of it. Aren’t the students going too far? There was a lot of idealism in the beginning. And the French police are brutes, aren’t they?
— Not like the nice English policemen.
But Jill didn’t want to get into a row about politics with her mother. She was sick of her own tired old opinions and indignation; at this moment, in truth, she couldn’t care less about Paris. She could just imagine what was going on over there: everyone denouncing all the wrongs in the world as if no one had ever denounced them before, all those students who’d never done a day’s work in their lives, so delighted with their sacrifices on behalf of the ‘workers’. Of course when she imagined those things she was really imagining Tom.
She had thought that when she arrived home she would spill over with her sorrows to her mother right away. Through all the difficulties of the long journey with the children, she had had this sensation as if she were holding the burden of these sorrows up out of the way and guarding them with her life: like a messenger in a story carrying something of terrible import, a signal for war or an enemy’s severed head. As soon as she was actually in Kington, her urgency diffused. How could she have forgotten this muffling effect of her home, where plain speaking was always deferred until a moment which never came? Instead they worried about eggs – and she found herself joining in, over the eggs, and the sheets and the hot water, as if these would suffice as coded, generalised expressions of affection, and concern. She waited for her mother to ask why she had come so precipitously, without warning. Perhaps Sophy really hadn’t read anything between the lines of all the letters Jill had sent, hadn’t intuited the failure of her marriage. Jill felt gratified and lonely both at once; loftily so much more experienced than her mother.
Later, when Sophy climbed upstairs with her arms full of the clean sheets she had been airing in front of the Rayburn, she saw through the open door of the bathroom that Jill was naked in the bath with all the children. Startled, she turned her eyes away from all that flesh, from the clambering, slithering, chubby limbs flushed pink in the hot water, and from her daughter’s bare breasts, still plump and shapely even though she’d fed three babies. All piled in together, they were splashing water everywhere on the lino. Some people round here would disapprove, Sophy knew, of the promiscuous bathing. She didn’t disapprove, but the sight made her afraid for Jill, as if it was a signal from the kind of life Jill had now, which Sophy couldn’t imagine: initiated into goodness knows what, in London with Tom. Sophy thought that she had not looked directly for a long time at any adult’s nakedness, not her husband’s, rarely even her own. Snapping out a sheet, ironed into its perfect squares, over the bed in Jill’s room, she was startled by catching sight of an old woman – clothed, thankfully – in the dressing-table mirror: tall, and so thin she seemed made like old bentwood furniture, with all the colour leached out of her, even out of her eyes. The giveaway slippery liver-dark mouth was ugly with doubt, Sophy thought, and the surprising upstanding crest of her hair made her look like an affronted bird: she forgot sometimes to put in the hairgrips to tame it.
When the baby and Roland had been put to bed, and Hettie was reading in the drawing room with her grandmother, Jill paced around the bedrooms in the dusk, in her stocking feet, drying the rope of her hair in a towel. The fresh smell of the fields at evening came in at the windows, tugging at her. It was unexpected to find that leaving a man was not chaste or nun-like; on the contrary, it seemed to have a smouldering sexual content. She looked out from her parents’ room at the alders stirring beside the river, heard the water hurrying on with that low-key urgent restlessness which sounded like rain when you woke to it in the night; her reflection surprised her in the mirror of the monumental wardrobe, she looked impatiently away. This reprieve was what she had longed for when she felt trapped and half-crazy, alone with the children in the flat in London, eking out the days with trips to the park, or with visiting friends – the friends had been no solace because she hadn’t told them what was happening with Tom, hadn’t wanted their opinions or their advice. All her rage and unhappiness and heightened excitement, over the past weeks, had focused in her longing to get home, as if that was a solution. But now she was actually in Kington, she seemed still to be waiting for something else, the next thing.
By the time her father returned the children were all in bed, and Jill had changed into a clean blouse and skirt. — You’ll never guess who’s here, she heard her mother say in the hall, helping him off with his coat. He strode into the drawing room with an exasperated low hum, resenting the intrusion of visitors, preparing his patience, tightening the belt on the flapping black gown which Tom derided as vanity and pantomime. Grantham Fellowes was small, austerely thin, his skin tanned and burned as dark as old leather. His cheeks and his eye sockets were sculptured pits; above a high naked forehead his thick hair was pure white, and light as down. Tom said Grantham cultivated this look, of a medieval Saint Jerome – or a fake, Pre-Raphaelite, copy of one. Jill was aware of making her own striking picture, sitting with her clean hair loose in the lamplight and a book open on her knee – though in truth she hadn’t been reading it, she couldn’t concentrate. There was deception in her composure but that was a good thing, she preferred to present him with an impermeable surface, her performance of an accomplished, fulfilled self. She could imagine spilling over in confidences to her mother, but couldn’t bear the idea of her father’s knowing yet about her failure, and judging it.
— Isn’t this lovely? Sophy said.
The surprise put him for a moment at a disadvantage. — Charlie! To what do we owe this unexpected honour?
— Just a whim, Jill said. — Hello, Daddy.
Charlie was his name for her in the days when they went around everywhere together and she had wanted to be a boy; he had started her off on Latin and ancient history while she was still in junior school, taught her elementary botany on their long walks – she had never complained when her legs were tired. She had gone with him into estate cottages without running water or electricity, where old men or women lay sick or dying; once it was a young man whose chest had been crushed by falling straw bales, and whose mother wanted him to pray, though he wouldn’t look at the minister. He had turned his head away, gargling and blowing bright terrible bubbles of blood which stained the dirty pillowcase; someone had hurried Jill out before she saw too much, although she already had. Her father had worn himself out campaigning to improve the living conditions of the rural workers, though he never identified with them, and wasn’t much loved – his manner was too distant, he didn’t know how to pu
t uneducated people at ease. In his poems he wrote about them sometimes as if they were insentient features of the landscape, like old stones or trees. He had a vision of a simple Christian community, toughened by hardship and contact with harsh natural law; he couldn’t sympathise when the country people wanted televisions and refrigerators. Now, with the mechanisation of the farms, so many were leaving the countryside to look for work in the cities; his congregation was mostly old women and a few incomers, retirees. Jill knew that he embraced this new turn of his fate as a comic irony, scourge of his pride.
It was absolutely dark in the bedroom the three children shared, yet in Hettie, lying in bed with her eyes strained open onto nothing, every sense was anxiously alert to the difference from home. Even the dark was different: in Marylebone a street lamp diffused its orange glow into their room so that she could always make out the hump of Roly in his bed – he slept bottom up, with his face in his pillow – and the bars of the baby’s cot casting a weak shadow on the wall. There, the headlights of cars passing crossed the ceiling in a deliciously, mysteriously purposeful slow arc; the night was always full of voices from the London street below.
Darkness in Kington was as dense as a hand clapped over her face, and her grandmother’s cool sheets smelled disconcertingly of lavender. At home Jill hardly had time to wash their sheets, let alone iron them, and Hettie had grown used to burrowing each night into the crumpled cloth smelling of herself, her dribble and biscuit crumbs and salty hair. Something barked in the woods: a fox, or a wolf? There was so much empty silence in the country that each sound seemed significant in ways Hettie couldn’t learn to understand; her dad didn’t understand them either. Jill knew the names of all the flowers and could recognise the birds by their songs; when Tom said he didn’t care, Hettie was reprieved, and hid away the I-Spy books of the countryside which were the record of her shame, hardly ticked at all. She preferred the wild animals in London zoo, safe behind bars and identified straightforwardly by the labels on their cages, which she was beginning to be able to read.
For a while she lay tormented and sorry for herself, needing to pee, disappointed in her body as she had been on the bus when she knew she would be sick. Eventually, swinging her legs from under the blankets, she slid down the side of the bed until her feet touched the bare boards of the floor, feeling with her toes for the rug: it occurred to her in a clutch of terror that in this darkness reality could be making and unmaking itself dizzily, unforeseen precipices opening ahead of her which were not there when she got into bed. Cautiously, she felt her way around by the wall – Ali stirred in the cot when she knocked against it, and made lip-smacking noises. At least Hettie could discern, once she was out from the bedroom – in a dim light escaping from wherever the grown-ups were talking downstairs – the looming perspectival shapes of so many doors, open and closed, to so many rooms fearfully unused, full with their emptiness. A blue-black sky showed in the uncurtained arched windows at either end of the landing. In the bathroom she peed and rubbed the hard toilet paper between her hands as her mother had showed her, till it was soft enough to use, then pulled the momentous long chain. On the windowsill ends of old soap were dissolving in a jam jar of gloopy water; her grandfather used these to wash his hair, it was one of the funny stories Daddy told about his meanness. Coming out onto the landing again, Hettie was quite blind, after the light in the bathroom.
Jill’s voice rang out downstairs, overbearing the murmurings of Granny and Grandfather. — Having the time of his life, she said. — Vive les étudiants! À bas le C.R.S.
Hettie had no idea why her mother was speaking in an unknown language, or what her father was doing, but thought her grandfather might make some cutting comment. She was anxiously wary of Grandfather’s disapproval on behalf of all her family – Roland because he was fussy over his food, the baby with her clamour and clutching fat fingers, though in fact he was tolerant of these sticky fingers, he liked Ali. Hettie had been drawn fatally, on certain occasions in the past, into the bad behaviour that brought a pained distaste onto her grandfather’s face; the more coldly he withdrew his attention, the more insanely she had tried to attract it, dissolving into tantrums and extremes of silliness which she feared he hadn’t forgotten. At least there was always Granny, who could be counted on to love you – though consequently Hettie rated her grandmother’s approval slightly less.
Tiptoeing in the dark along the landing, she didn’t want to climb back into her reproachful lavender-bed. In her mother’s room the curtains weren’t drawn across and the window was pulled up a few inches, letting in the shock of ripe night air, as cold as water. By touch Hettie identified the familiar loved items unpacked onto the dressing table: hairbrush, face cream, scent bottle. A little lamp with a short chrome neck offered an irresistible upright press-switch in its base; she pressed, and the room sprang into satisfying being, with her mother’s library book, Margaret Drabble, and its postcard-marker, and her mother’s spare shoes, and the coat in her mother’s shape on its hanger. Hettie breathed L’Air du Temps on her fingers, and longed to slip for warmth into the insulated space between the pink satin eiderdown and the top blanket; it was so perfect, when she tried it, that she closed her eyes in bliss. Jill woke her later, coming to bed and cross. — In the country when you put on the light at night, she said, — you must make sure the windows are closed first. Look at all the bugs that have come in.
Hettie thought guiltily that she must still be dreaming: the walls of the room were crowded with blundering moth-shadows, looming and receding. — I lost my way. I came in your room by mistake, it’s too dark here at night.
Her mother was implacable about returning her to her own bed.
— You’re my big girl, Hettie. You have to be sensible.
Jill left the children with her mother the next day and caught the bus into town: one ran from the village every morning, returning in the early afternoon. She needed things from the shops – food, zinc ointment for the baby’s nappy rash, Tampax. And she had business there too which she didn’t mention to her mother: she called in at the estate agents, to make enquiries about properties available to rent locally. It was strange to be back in these streets sodden with familiarity, and it was the first time in weeks – in months even – that she had been anywhere alone. Without the pushchair and the children hanging on to her she was weightlessly afloat. The estate agent she spoke to was someone she had known from primary school; she and he had been set apart together in the little gang of clever ones who would pass the eleven plus. Big-limbed and blushing, he looked displaced now in his poky office, but must have chosen it in preference to a life on the family farm – for the past’s sake, Jill felt tenderly towards his freckled pink wrist, clumsy in his clean shirt-cuff. She was aware of putting on a performance as married and sophisticated; she had pinned up her hair in front of the mirror that morning and now she flaunted her wedding ring, crossing her legs conspicuously in their slippery nylon tights under her short skirt. It was important to convince them all that she was sane and worldly, even as she made crazy plans to manage by herself.
— My husband has to travel a lot for work, she said. — If we rented somewhere down here, I could be closer to my parents, my mother could help with the children.
When they shook hands he called her Mrs Crane, and asked if he should send through details of any new properties that came up – but Jill didn’t want her parents to know what her plans were, not yet. — Don’t bother to post them, she said, smiling, charming him. — I’ll call in here whenever I’m in town.
She had time, when she’d finished shopping, for a coffee at The Bungalow on the high street. Tom would despise The Bungalow, where the fake beams were festooned with horse collars and horse brasses, there were plastic flowers in the vases, and the elderly waitresses – wizened, she imagined him calling them – wore black dresses and white organdie aprons with starched frills. A friend of Sophy’s at another table – Women’s Institute, tennis – waved to Jill, she waved b
ack. I could live here, all the same, she thought. Because life is just life; I can choose to belong anywhere. Who’s to say all our radical friends in London are right, with their condemnations? You live how you can.
Reading through the details the estate agent had given her, she was exultant with self-sufficiency, though she didn’t see anything that fitted in the least with her idea – her old schoolmate, not knowing her, had chosen all the modern horrors for her, little boxes new-built on the edge of town, which in any case she couldn’t afford. What she dreamed of was somewhere on the edge of social life, where she could be free, not cluttered with falsity. She didn’t really know how much she had to spend, except that it was next to nothing – even if Tom sent her half his money, which he would very likely refuse to do. In London she had been getting copy-editing work from a couple of publishers, but she didn’t think they’d go on using her if she moved away. Recklessly she ate a buttered teacake, then ordered another one. These past awful weeks, she had gone days forgetting almost to eat; now she was wildly hungry and thirsty.
Sophy’s friend – gaunt and powdered and faintly arty, with dangling earrings – stopped on her way out, to ask yearningly after the London theatres. She said she always looked out for Tom’s articles, he was so clever. — Sophy didn’t mention she was expecting you. Are you staying long? She’ll be so happy to have you home. Isn’t it term time? Harriet must have started school by now.
Suavely Jill explained something about the children having had feverish colds, needing to recuperate in the country air. Because she was the vicar’s daughter, she’d learned to lie from an early age, not caring much if anyone believed her, so long as she firmly deflected further enquiry. When she paid for her teacakes and coffee she found that her mother had slipped a ten-shilling note into her purse – half-infuriating, but useful. Sophy was full of these secret charities, pre-empting you, accomplished with a little shy fuss like a quiver of nerves. Dawdling on her way to the bus stop, Jill saw a card in the wool shop window, advertising for part-time staff, and on an impulse she went inside, not caring who was watching. She didn’t recognise the woman who took down her details. The manageress wasn’t in today – perhaps Jill could call in again on Monday?
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