by Amanda Craig
Also by Amanda Craig
Foreign Bodies
A Private Place
A Vicious Circle
In a Dark Wood
Love in Idleness
Hearts and Minds
Novella
The Other Side of You
Copyright
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-1-4087-0931-3
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Amanda Craig The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
To my mother
‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside … But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.’
– Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Like everything else which is not the result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
– W. H. Auden
Contents
Also by Amanda Craig
Copyright
Dedication
1 There is No Money
2 Ten Green Bottles
3 One Bungalow Deep in Village Idiots
4 Everything Has to Be So Slow
5 Sally and Baggage
6 This is England, Too
7 Xan Gets a Job
8 Quentin Unleashed
9 Up on Dartmoor
10 Cabin Fever
11 Why Bother?
12 Quentin’s Hellish Hols
13 The Deep Midwinter
14 Swim, or Drown
15 A Far Better Place
16 Lottie Resurgens
17 Anything is Better than Nothing
18 Xan Among the Poles
19 Lambing Time
20 Work, Not Love
21 This Animal Life
22 Born Lucky
23 The Recording Angel for West Devon
24 The Siren Call
25 A Thousand Years as a Sheep
26 A Pinnacle of Existence
27 The Business of Being a Woman
28 Quentin Cultivates His Garden
29 The Wind in the Grass
30 The Silence of the Lambs
31 Nothing but Living
32 Grief, or Relief?
33 The Only Thing
34 Sour and Sweet
35 The Iron Hook
36 Some Chance
37 An Inescapable Web
38 The Ash Tree
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1
There is No Money
There is no money, and the Bredins can’t afford to divorce.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a chance?’
‘No.’
It’s so long since they have spoken to each other, rather than exchanging curt texts on their mobile phones, that talking face to face seems strange.
‘God, this is pretty bad, isn’t it?’ Quentin says. He pours himself a third glass of wine and inspects it. ‘I never thought that divorce was something I wouldn’t be able to afford.’
‘In any case, things can’t go on like this,’ Lottie says. She does not drink. One of them, and it is always she, has to keep a clear head.
The ruin of a marriage is a trivial thing to the persons not involved. Since Quentin’s infidelities were discovered, there have been revolutions, earthquakes, hurricanes, acts of terrorism and a worldwide economic crisis, yet as far as the Bredins are concerned, none of these matter.
‘I simply don’t believe the bloody house won’t sell.’
‘It will, but not for what we need to buy a home each.’
‘What about renting?’
‘The only thing that will raise an income is if we rent this house, and move somewhere cheaper. A lot cheaper.’
In the kitchen it is perfectly quiet, though the nearby flyover murmurs lamentations. The trees are dull with dust, unrelieved by rain and swollen with summer sun. Upstairs their daughters are asleep and Lottie’s son Xan is locked in his bedroom wearing a onesie and watching a film downloaded via Pirate Bay. On the table is a meal, the first they have shared in many months, cooked by Quentin with ingredients bought by Lottie. Every domestic task is now supposed to be shared. Half of the long beech veneer table from Heal’s, the half at which Lottie and the children eat, has been meticulously wiped clean. The other half, at which Quentin sits, glitters with microscopic crumbs that catch the evening light like pulverised jewels.
‘You mean moving to the country,’ Quentin says.
‘Yes.’ Lottie looks into the white china bowl before them, where a few last strands of spaghetti swirl vertiginously in their red sauce, as if disappearing down a plughole.
A dozen recriminations rise, and are bitten back. No matter how much each feels violently wounded by the other, they must keep talking.
A gloom lies over the world. Only a short while ago it seemed as if they were all on an endless soaring ride up to heaven. Now, they are plummeting down so low that nobody is sure when the fall will stop. Banks have defaulted, businesses have gone bankrupt and millions have lost their belief in a better future. Everybody is anxious. Some continue to live as they always have done, or possibly even better, but more see their income shrivel and their hopes fade.
Waking with fortitude, living with compromise and sleeping with stress is normal for an architect in Britain. Even during the best of times, Lottie has spent weeks drawing up plans for projects over which clients have then backtracked, changed their minds and cancelled. Experience has taught her that nothing is ever built without compromise, and yet she had expected better of marriage. For just as we expect sweetness from the milk we first drink, so the child born to a happy union is wholly unprepared for disharmony. Lottie had failed to understand what she risked when marrying Quentin; but then waking with optimism, living with laxity and sleeping without self-reproach is normal for a journalist.
What a fool I was, she thinks. Yet he had never been violent, dirty or mean with money; there are plenty of men who are this, and more. In the beginning, Quentin had brought colour, humour and fun into her life, just as she had brought order, calm and seriousness into his. They shared many interests, and were both the children of teachers. Yet the differences between them have made it clear that no reconciliation is possible.
Work has defined Quentin, as a mould does jelly. Without it, he is prone to depression, irritability and loss of libido. He has been adept at sidestepping the bile and smuggery of the Left and the guile and thuggery of the Right; being clever and talented, versatile and ambitious, he has been courted for almost thirty years. Since losing his job, however, it’
s as if he no longer exists. People he has known since university let their eyes slide past him. His bitterness about the collapse of his career is more than equal to Lottie’s over her marriage.
This particular day of crisis had come about through a typical oversight: Quentin had forgotten to renew the parking permit on the family car. He has always taken care of the taxing and servicing of vehicles as a contribution to the smooth running of family life, but having detached himself from it he had failed to take care of the paperwork. Consequently, he had received a parking fine which he neglected to pay, followed by interest which mounted rapidly into hundreds of pounds that he was too angry or impatient to deal with. At dawn this morning, two bullet-headed bailiffs from a debt-collection agency had tricked their way in, and demanded goods to the value of £1000 for the money owed. Lottie, white as wax in her nightdress, had been forced to give them a flat-screen TV; Quentin, his motorbike.
Lottie says, in a low voice, ‘I can’t believe that somebody could do something like that, in our own home.’
‘It’s not our home.’ Quentin, too, is shaken. ‘The bank owns part of it, remember?’
For the first time in their lives, they feel poor, and frightened. Their gaze has always been fixed slightly upwards; if they have been conscious of poverty it has been largely as a source of ugliness. Until this day, it had never occurred to them how swiftly the accumulated privilege of two professional careers could be lost. Each had jumped through the right academic hoops, worked hard, saved, paid taxes and been able to acquire that golden ticket to a better life, a house in London. Everybody in the world wants this, and even though the Bredins’ home is in what has been an unfashionable and run-down area, it is now, at almost £1 million, absurdly valuable.
Before the crunch became a downturn, before the downturn became a recession, it was taken for granted that their children would be privately educated, their health insured, their holidays exotic and their minds stimulated by all the intellectual entertainments the capital has to offer. Their five-bedroomed home at the wrong end of Randolph Avenue, the joint total of two incomes and some unacknowledged luck, has added many thousands of pounds to its putative value: if they have been smug, as members of the luckiest generation in British history, then so have many others.
The sensations of acquiring a home are not dissimilar from those elicited by romantic love, not least because the house they bought has been transformed from a shabby rooming house to a place where they were once almost entirely happy. Here they have thrown lively parties, taken deep baths, filled large fridges, and returned from holidays with relief. Stripped, replastered, rewired, repainted and reconfigured, the house has been the third party in a charmed union. When they borrowed an additional £100,000 to give it three new bathrooms, a splendid new kitchen extension, stair carpets, fitted bookshelves and cupboards, it seemed like an entirely rational thing to do. No longer: for both have lost their jobs.
‘We have to move.’
Despite her best intentions, Lottie’s eyes suddenly brim with hot tears. She looks away.
Quentin is filled with weary dislike. The whole disaster is as much her fault as his. For many months after Stella was born Lottie changed from an enthusiastic lover to one who was perpetually exhausted, unwell and rejecting; he had been grateful to be living in an age of computer pornography. In the end, however, he had been a starving man offered a steak sandwich. Most normal men would have cracked in such conditions, but he never meant to hurt his wife.
‘It was just sex. They meant nothing,’ he had said, aware of the banality of his words.
‘Am I nothing? Are your children nothing?’
Lottie’s fury and distress astounded him, for he had always seen her as supremely self-controlled. Yet she became a madwoman, screaming and sobbing, and had even confronted one of his mistresses at the annual summer party of the magazine he then edited – much to the entertainment of his colleagues. Mortified but unrepentant, Quentin fled to a new job in America, and the Bredins separated. For three years they had led separate lives, coming together for brief family Christmases and tense summers, pretending to the girls that it was all temporary. When he returned, jobless, he found that Lottie had neglected to have the locks changed, and promptly moved back in. It has been thoroughly unpleasant, but he refuses to budge.
‘I am not going to clear out or live in a hotel just because your pride has been wounded.’
‘It’s called adultery, Quentin. You promise not to do it when you marry someone, remember?’
She is no longer tearful, but her contempt for him is withering. Someone who automatically ascribes the worst possible motives for everything you do is an experience that even the joy of being with his children again can’t obliterate. Yet he has no option but to continue to squat here, sleeping on the sofa in his study and trying to drum up freelance commissions while Lottie pays the mortgage she had taken out in happier times. However, even this has gone wrong now that she, too, is unemployed.
Lottie, looking at him, sees her redundancy as her husband’s fault. Had she not been devastated by the collapse of her marriage she would probably have kept her job; as it is, she has lost everything. Her vocation has demanded years of training and testing: to design and build is what she’s wanted to do ever since she first laid her hands on a Lego set. (It had been intended for her cousin Justin, who was far more interested in the pink tutu given to her.) The loss of her career makes her feel as if she is falling into an abyss. There is no money for their daughters’ school fees, and she is racked by anxiety about her son. He has failed to make his offer from Cambridge, and instead of shrugging his shoulders at what is always a lottery, has withdrawn from the other universities in anger and despair. She’s desperately afraid that he has taken rejection so much to heart that he’ll now go off the tracks altogether. Trying to galvanise him to reapply, trying to keep the household budget under control, looking for new schools for the girls and making the effort of appearing cheerful has been achieved only with antidepressants.
‘There must be some economies that would help.’ Quentin’s voice has taken on a note of bewildered complaint. ‘Can’t you just sack the cleaner?’
Lottie gives a small, weary smile.
‘I did, months ago.’
‘Ah.’ Quentin gulps more wine. ‘That explains my shirts. What about the girls’ schools?’
‘We’ve been living off the refund of the school deposit.’
‘Surely any local primary would be thrilled to have them?’
Lottie winces. She has never been comfortable with this kind of assumption.
‘No. They are all oversubscribed.’
Why did I marry her? he asks himself.
It was his first wife’s money that, once he’d agreed to a hasty marriage and a hastier divorce, had provided the initial deposit on his flat in Camden during the halcyon of the 1980s. Since then, he’d ridden the property boom, trading onwards and upwards until, at forty, he owned a nice two-bedroomed flat in Islington. So what was it about Lottie that made him forget his instinct for self-preservation? It wasn’t beauty: though ten years younger than him, she looks older, these days. In addition, she irritates him more than anyone he has ever known – apart from his father – and the more miserable she looks, the more he dislikes her.
‘I just want this to be over.’
‘Exactly. That sofa-bed in my study seems to have both the rock and the hard place lodged in it.’
‘Perhaps it’s your conscience,’ Lottie says, in a rare flash of wit.
‘I am trying to be sensible—’ he begins, but it’s too late. The rage between them is flaring up, like phosphorus in water.
‘If you were sensible, we would not be in this predicament. We would, at least, have each other.’
‘One must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.’
Lottie returns to the main subject with an effort.
‘This house has to be rented out, and we have to rent another that is cheaper.
’
Quentin pours himself another glass.
‘We’ll both get other jobs.’
‘No, we won’t,’ Lottie says. ‘We may never get another job. The life we had before is gone. If we’re very, very lucky, the property market will rise enough for us to be able to sell this place and have enough for a flat each. But it will take at least a year, and in the meantime we can’t continue here.’
Quentin says, grudgingly, ‘This house would bring in, what, £4000 a month?’
‘Think half that, minus the agent’s fees and tax. We’d clear enough to cover the mortgage and rent somewhere else, but probably not quite enough to live off.’
‘Live off?’
‘Yes, Quentin. We have to live on something, even far, far away. We’re lucky to have even that option.’
‘What about France?’
It’s like talking to a child, she thinks. ‘No. The euro is too risky. There is, however, Devon.’
Appalled, he stares at her.
‘I am not going back!’
‘I don’t see why not. Your parents might like to see more of you.’
‘Lottie, you know as well as I that my work depends on my being here. Here in London, where everything happens.’
‘It is the only solution.’
Quentin feels sick. ‘You’ve no idea what the countryside is like to live in, especially Devon. If you stand still for a minute there, fungus grows between your toes. It rains all the time. They don’t like strangers.’
‘We wouldn’t be complete strangers because of your parents. The girls can go into a nice village primary, and Xan can find work.’
‘But neither of us will ever get another job there.’
‘There’s the Internet, and the train from Exeter. You could commute if necessary.’
‘Like you have any idea how other people live.’
Her cheeks flush, but she makes no response.
‘I might consider it for just one year.’ Quentin pauses. ‘But I demand a room of my own.’
Lottie says, ‘What about Xan? He can’t sleep with the girls, he’s a young man now.’
‘You’re talking four bedrooms, minimum, then.’
