by Amanda Craig
‘Actually, there is a possibility. A farmhouse, available now.’
Quentin looks at her with deep suspicion.
‘You’ve actually found a place?’
‘It’s near Trelorn, outside a village called Shipcott. I’ve got it on my laptop, see? Four bedrooms, big kitchen, beautiful views and best of all, amazingly cheap. Your mother says it’s lovely.’
‘If she says that, it’ll be a nightmare.’
He knows what Devon longhouses are like: all built to a pattern for dwarfs with thick skulls, and this looks no exception. It’s a long, L-shaped whitewashed cob building, no thatch but roofed with slate, bound to blow off in winter. The kind of thing that fools in the city think is picturesque, but which anyone with experience of country life knows is riddled with rot, rats, bats and beams. The photographs of the inside show lashings of pine and a lavender bathroom suite circa 1972.
‘What about the local primary school?’
She clicks on the Ofsted report. ‘It’s rated Outstanding. It has lots of outdoor space, good teacher-to-pupil ratio, and only about eleven children per year. In London you’d be paying through the nose for that.’
Yes, Quentin thinks, and it’d be worth it, too.
‘How much is the rent?’
‘Five hundred pounds,’ says Lottie.
‘A week?’
‘A month.’
Even Quentin is surprised by this. ‘There’s got to be something wrong with it.’
‘There isn’t any central heating; and we would have to sign up for the whole year. We can’t afford to be fussy. We just can’t,’ Lottie says. ‘Besides, it’s too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘I’ve found tenants for this place.’ Lottie almost laughs at his outraged expression. ‘Canadian lawyers are moving in next month. Unless you’d like to return their deposit?’
So it is fixed.
‘It’ll be fun, you’ll see,’ Lottie tells the children the next day; ‘it’ll be an adventure for us all to move to the country.’
Quentin says, ‘In the countryside nobody can hear you scream.’
2
Ten Green Bottles
Lottie is sitting outside a café in Highgate, trying to seem normal. Bad as it had been to lose her husband, getting him back is infinitely worse.
Each minute of each hour, she feels maddened by sharing the same air, let alone the same roof. When she first found out about his infidelities she had been so shocked she could barely breathe, but now their arguments, really always the same argument, go round and round like clothes in a tumble dryer. She accuses him of being shallow, promiscuous, irresponsible and a liar. He accuses her of being a sociopath, frigid and the most controlling person on earth.
‘All you want is to keep everyone on a leash.’
‘What you call a leash is fidelity.’
‘It’s not my fault I can’t be faithful to you.’
Few things are more painful than loathing and despising someone you have once loved and admired. She has been through each stage of misery, from looking for scraps of affirmation that he might still love her, to obscene sexual fantasies about what he must have done with his other women, to hating him so much she wanted to put ground glass in his food, to thinking that they might be able to work it out if he has therapy, to despising herself for having ever been with him in the first place, to thinking that if she had a revenge affair then he might come to his senses. What she wants most is just to stop feeling. She thinks about her marriage almost as much as she thinks about being poor, which is to say, every waking moment. Other than his professed love for their daughters, Quentin has no redeeming qualities – though he accuses her of poisoning the girls’ minds against him.
‘No, you do that all by yourself whenever you shout at me.’
‘Why would I do that? You’re the shouter, not me.’
This is one of his most odious techniques: implying that his awful behaviour is all in her mind. Another is to say, ‘You have a serious issue about trust.’
Lottie is astounded by how low someone she loved could sink, and how much he can still hurt her. She wants to crawl away into a hole and sleep for a hundred years, but because of the children she has had to summon every reserve of will to find a way forward, even though it means leaving London and almost everyone she has ever known, including her mother.
People who have not been through what she is going through just can’t imagine it. She has poured out her miseries to her cousin Justin, who had originally introduced her to Quentin, and to her school-friend Hemani, who through her own lawyer friend Polly Noble had put her in touch with a specialist in divorce. They have listened sympathetically, and suggested seeing a therapist, but she can’t even afford that. Her redundancy payment has dwindled to less than £2000, and the most important thing is to minimise the suffering of her children.
Yet Lottie is more English than the English (which is to say, half-German). When her boss sacked her in April he’d said, ‘You’re a tough cookie, Lottie, and I know you’ll survive.’
What he meant was that she could be relied on not to burst into tears or sue him for constructive dismissal. Lottie has the kind of shield-shaped face that always looks calm, but she has so many things to be angry about that she often finds herself humming Ten Green Bottles.
‘And if one green bottle,
Should accidentally fall …’
In one bottle is her heartbreak over her son. Lottie thinks of all the work she has turned down, the promotions she missed and clients she annoyed, simply to support Xan, her first-born, fatherless and until recently, only child. Gifted, gentle, handsome and hard-working, his conception had been the accident which turned out to be a blessing. Now, he hates her.
‘Just fuck off and leave me alone!’ he roars whenever she taps on his bedroom door. His hair is one big puffball of neglect; she’s terrified he is clinically depressed. His two best friends have both got into the universities of their choice: Hemani’s son Bron to UCL to read Medicine, and Dylan to read Philosophy at Oxford. Xan is reapplying nowhere.
‘I wouldn’t mind so much if Xan were lazy, but he’s so bright and he worked so hard,’ she told her mother, Marta. ‘I keep telling him that Oxbridge doesn’t matter, that all Russell Group universities are terrific, but he takes no notice. He’s always driven himself too hard and now he’s blaming my marriage, or going to a private school, or being mixed-race or just being too boring.’
‘I know, but that way, madness lies,’ her mother answered. ‘Have faith.’
‘Faith in what?’
‘In your son. You can’t rescue him; he must rescue himself.’
Marta, too, has put a lot of time and effort into Xan’s upbringing. Lottie had been just twenty-three when she discovered she was six months pregnant. She did not even know the name of her child’s father, except that he had been drunk, like herself, at a large party, and overwhelmingly attractive. It was like one of those encounters with a god in Greek myth: he’d appeared, and then he’d disappeared. What made it all the more humiliating was that she was the last person anyone would have expected to become a single mother. Marta had converted the top floor of her house into a small flat, shifted her own workload, and enabled Lottie to complete the crucial second part of her training as an architect. It had been Marta’s face, not Lottie’s, that Xan had looked for at the end of every school day.
‘If he could be off at university, Mutti, the rest would not be so bad.’
‘My darling, there’s something to be said for disappointment early in life.’
It’s all very well for Marta. Her mother has so much self-confidence that sometimes Lottie wonders whether she has colonised her own share of it, much as in some families one member seems to have a disproportionate amount of luck, leaving little left over for the rest. But Marta adores Xan with a fierce, steely love quite unlike Lottie’s own, where to love and to worry are inextricably intertwined in her mind: why else should the word �
��care’ hold its double meaning? Xan now accuses her of being a ‘helicopter mother’.
‘All I want to do is protect you.’
‘But you can’t. And in any case, you failed the moment you married Dud.’
In another two bottles are Stella and Rosie, the innocent casualties of their father’s selfishness. They are so young they are almost transparent, like tiny snails; she can see every emotion pulsing through them.
‘But why don’t you love each other any more? Why can’t you stop quarrelling?’ Stella asks.
‘We just can’t,’ Lottie told them. She longs to be able to say, ‘Because your daddy is a selfish, lying philandering bastard,’ but must not. She must suffer, like the heroine of a fairy tale, and not say a word. Oh, there are so many fictions – Quentin has almost written a three-volume novel justifying his own actions, and she is so weary of it – that the cause of their mutual loathing is as mysterious as love. Yet whatever they do or don’t believe, the emotional damage is likely to be far-reaching: as a consequence of all that has happened, her daughters must leave behind all the tender infant friendships made in London, and adjust to being at Shipcott Primary, where they know nobody.
‘I’ll never make another friend like Bella, never,’ Stella sobbed. ‘Why can’t I stay here?’
‘Because Daddy and I won’t be here to look after you, sweetie.’
‘Then why can’t I stay here without you?’
‘Another family is going to pay us to live in our house in London, while we move to a new home in Devon. It’s cheaper to live in the country, you see.’
‘Is that because nobody wants to live there?’
Rosie doesn’t ask pointed questions like these. She wakes, night after night after night, her bed and nightdress sopping with urine, and demands to sleep in Lottie’s bed. So at 3 a.m., Lottie has the choice: wake up enough to strip her child, and the bed, or allow her to sleep, restless and reeking, with her.
In the fourth bottle is Lottie’s grinding sorrow at having lost her job, and with it any hope of hanging on to a few remaining shreds of self-respect or a viable future. For all its frustrations and complications, architecture is not just a profession but a vocation; and she had loved it.
In the fifth bottle is being forty-two. The cruelty of biology is such that, if she were to find another man, he’d probably be in his seventies, because men never look for a partner who is their own age. It’s no consolation to see that Quentin, ten years older than herself, is still a handsome man, whereas the most that can be said for her is that, having put on too much weight during her pregnancies, she can once again fit into the clothes she wore as a student.
‘People keep asking if I have cancer,’ she remarks to her cousin Justin, when they meet.
‘Sweetie, it’s called the divorce diet.’
‘Just take my advice and don’t marry Sebastian. Anyone who marries is insane.’
‘Lottie, we want to get married for the same reason you did. We’re in love, and we want to have the legal rights we’ve been denied for centuries.’
Justin and his future husband look so alike they remind her of Tweedledum and Tweedledee; they have a cottage in Stoke Newington, and radiate happiness.
‘Darling Justin, I’ve longed for you to find true love with someone worthy of you, only I don’t think it exists.’
‘I hate seeing you like this, Lottie. You will find happiness again.’
‘People make far too much of happiness. What we ought to be seeking is autonomy. That’s the essential thing.’
There is a whole row of green bottles boiling and swirling with venomous mist involving Quentin’s girlfriends which she mustn’t think about because they are, essentially, blameless. However sordid it is to have an affair with a married person, they are not the ones who made a promise of fidelity. No doubt he had broken their hearts, too, though how can one romantic disappointment measure up to the destruction of a family?
All things considered, Lottie would really prefer to see her mother in private, but Marta insists on a brisk constitutional walk across the Heath every morning with her white terrier.
‘Darling!’ she says, bestowing a kiss redolent of Revlon. Her glasses match Heidi’s bright pink collar, and her thick white hair is immaculately styled. ‘Breakfast?’
Lottie shakes her head. Marta orders a double macchiato for herself, a poached egg with toast, and a smoothie.
‘How are you?’ Lottie asks, to forestall further enquiries.
‘I am in mint condition. So, you are upside-downing?’
‘Downsizing. Yes,’ Lottie says. Her mother had rescued her once before, when she had Xan, but it’s out of the question she could do so again. An adult and three children, one now eighteen, could not fit into the two spare rooms of Marta’s tall, thin house, not that she’s offered.
‘Are you really not interested in breakfast? You are too thin.’
‘No.’
There are so many things about divorce that you are never told, Lottie thinks, ducking to avoid being seen by someone she’d been at school with. Those who have been lucky in love, like her mother, have a kind of virginal innocence about what a really bad marriage is like.
But then, Marta had been widowed young. Edward Evenlode had been thirty-four when he died of a brain aneurysm after a recital at the Wigmore Hall. He had come from a large, dull upper-class family which mostly confined itself to farming and soldiering. Lottie and Marta were perfectly happy to live without such relations, and even happier when Xan arrived.
Having a baby so young meant that she was largely cut off from the companionship of her peers, but it also meant that she was able to continue living under her mother’s roof. They all got on so well, and Marta’s respect for her privacy meant she was free to entertain any guests; the occasional flings with men who couldn’t handle her son’s jealousy persuaded her that she would remain single. Then she met Quentin.
Justin, who worked with him on the Rambler, warned her when it was too late.
‘He has what the Americans call a zipper problem. Don’t fall in love with him.’
Lottie trusted Quentin for the most idiotic reason: when they met for the second time on a dirty train, he had taken off his own coat, opened it, taken hers and folded it so that her coat was wrapped in his, unsullied. She noticed that he was good-looking, well-dressed and, unusually for a British man, did not smell bad; but she was also charmed by the twinkle in his eye, the liveliness of his mind and a warmth she mistook for kindness. Like herself, he was not entirely English, having a Jewish South African mother. He was not intimidated by her intelligence, drawing out a flushed and laughing self that she had forgotten. By chance, they met again, and in the course of a train journey from London to Leeds discussed everything from politics to films to an exhibition they had both enjoyed. He invited her to dinner the following week. She never intended to sleep with him so soon. Even now, with a vividness which makes her flush to the creases of her body, she can still remember how astonishing the sex had been. For the first time she understood why a man might be irresistible.
Quentin also had a son of his own, now grown-up, fathered in South Africa when he was only twenty-one. It was another bond between them, though he, typically, had been paid to marry, then divorce, his child’s mother by the mother’s family. Which should have warned me, Lottie reflects. Quentin seemed to appreciate Xan, teaching him to ride a bicycle and taking Xan’s opinions seriously. Her son, so watchful and suspicious of other men, worshipped him. Quentin had actually asked his permission to marry his mother before he asked Lottie, and Xan had given his solemn consent. It had been a master-stroke.
‘Are you sure, Xan, that you are OK if he becomes your stepfather?’
‘Mum, he’s cool even though he has a silly name. You really like him don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I even like his name. It sounds romantic, not silly.’
Three months after, they were married.
She wondered
why more people didn’t take this step. To be licensed by society to do all those wicked, secret, thrilling things and for it to be not just legal but expected felt wonderful. Once Quentin sold his flat, they had put down a deposit on the rundown house on the edge of Kilburn where they expected to live for ever. Both their careers took off to new levels, and she got to work on transforming their Victorian semi into a Modernist miracle of light and space. In retrospect, she thinks, they had been nauseatingly pleased with themselves, and each other.
‘You are so serious, so good,’ he told her. ‘You do a proper job.’
‘So do you.’
‘Oh, journalism is totally ephemeral.’
‘But one that’s vital to democracy. Architecture – well, if you make a mistake it’s there for generations, and people hate you for it.’
She met his parents, liked his mother immediately and his father less so – but that was fine, because Quentin detested him.
‘He’s a shit, and if he were ten years younger he’d have tried to seduce you,’ he said.
Lottie couldn’t help laughing at the idea; Hugh Bredin was old and some sort of minor poet. His wife, Naomi, was a potter.
‘They seem sweet,’ she said.
‘I have no interests in common with them, especially not my father,’ Quentin insisted.
What did interest Quentin, she came to realise, was money. His friends and ex-girlfriends were always wealthy, some quite staggeringly so; Lottie, however, had not gone to a private school, and money had always been tight. Yet the fluke of London property prices means that her mother’s house in Church Row, bought for a thousand pounds after the War, is worth, conservatively, £5 million. One of Lottie’s most bitter reflections of late is to wonder whether this was what he had found attractive about her all along: she will never forget the way Quentin’s eyes lit up when she first brought him there. He views the London property market as a kind of magical force in his life which has made him, alongside everyone else who bought a home there in the 1980s, rich beyond his wildest dreams. The £20,000 which his first wife’s family paid him to disappear had, by the time of his second marriage, grown into £300,000, and now into £500,000, all thanks to property. The thought that he might lose any portion of it when they get divorced gives her savage satisfaction.
