by Amanda Craig
Lottie says, ‘I hope you’ll visit us.’
‘At Christmas, I will definitely come, my darling.’
Marta says, gently, ‘I can’t help you, you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Lottie says. She has made her own bed and must lie in it, even if the bed in question will be a thin mattress on a wire base rather than the super-king-sized Vi-Spring that must remain behind for the tenants.
‘What a shame you did not marry that other man.’
Lottie groans to herself but answers, ‘He disappeared.’
‘Oh, not Xan’s papa, obviously – but, the architect you lived with – what was his name?’
‘Martin. Not my type, or I his.’
Martin had been another architect, plump with red hair, a bit like William Morris. They had shared a place in Spitalfields together, when the houses there had still been such slums that students could afford to rent them, and he was just one of a group of friends, though particularly loyal. She had tried to stay in touch, but Quentin had picked a fight with him because his idea of small talk was to discuss metal fatigue in motorway flyovers. Still, when Lottie thinks of all the men she might have married, she remembers something her old friend Hemani had said: ‘Why didn’t we realise when we were twenty-two that we could have married almost anyone?’
Hemani loathes Quentin, and says she should divorce him immediately: but her friend is an eye surgeon married to the nicest, most civilised kind of American. Lottie sighs, and watches the people at other tables: the young mothers, exhausted but still hopeful; the resting actors; the retired people whose pensions have not yet imploded; the joggers and dog-walkers. All around her are Londoners unaffected by what is being called ‘the current economic climate’. They still drive big cars, go on foreign holidays, wear designer clothes and send their children to private schools. They expect to be able to go to the theatre or restaurants or opera, to not clean their homes and to shop at artisan farmers’ markets – just as she had done until very recently. It’s hard not to hate them.
‘This cottage,’ Marta is saying. ‘It looks charming in the link you sent.’
‘Looks, but isn’t,’ Lottie answers. ‘There’s no central heating.’
‘My darling, all we had when you were born were storage heaters.’
‘Yes, and heaven knows what it’ll do to Xan’s asthma.’
Lottie’s mobile buzzes. It’s one of the children asking plaintively when she’ll be home. Xan is supposed to be babysitting, but he’s probably playing Call of Duty. I’d like to see a game about the real Call of Duty, Lottie thinks, in which you jump from log to log with a feverish child under one arm and a laptop under the other, a game in which the blood is real and there are no second chances.
‘You will be fine, my darling. Many people dream of escaping to the country, to live in peace and quiet.’
‘Ha! With my husband around I’ll be certain to have neither.’
When Marta takes her leave, Lottie runs all the way home. The hard grey pavements jar her knees. She hates the pollution, the parking fines, the noise, the drunken teenagers riding children’s bikes, the rubbish and dried vomit, the overpriced shops selling nothing useful: yet the thought of leaving London is terrifying. Apart from her years at university, this has been her home all her life.
The new house, by contrast, is ludicrously rural. Not only does it have just one bathroom, but there’s also a dank little room behind the stair at the back, half-buried in the hillside, with a kind of granite bath on one side. A big iron hook hangs over it from the ceiling.
‘What on earth is this for?’ Lottie wondered aloud.
‘It’s where the farm pig would have its throat cut, every year, and be salted,’ Quentin said.
‘Ugh.’
‘Useful as a wine cellar,’ said the agent, brightly. ‘Or a broom cupboard.’
How bad can it be to live in the country? Boring, but not as boring as being utterly broke in the city, Lottie thinks. Below the garden a big field sloped down, quite steeply, towards a small river, invisible in its wooded valley. On the other side, field, wood and hill rose until the flanks of Dartmoor bulged against a vast, cloud-flecked sky.
‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ the estate agent remarked.
The view is the reason why the house might be bearable, although the tenebrous kitchen has mean, metal-framed windows looking out to a small orchard burdened with large, wasp-flecked apples, a withered vegetable patch, and a rusting clothes airer.
‘What a pity there’s no window on the gable end, looking down the valley,’ Lottie remarked. The large pine dresser was not to her taste either.
‘Probably to keep the wind out,’ the agent told her.
It was all energy-saving light bulbs, wall-to-wall carpet, brown furniture and thin sagging curtains. It would need every scrap of furnishings she can scrounge out of her own home to make it bearable.
As usual she is organising everything. She’s cleaned their own house from top to bottom, arranged with the agent for the tenants to move in the day they leave; she’s booked the removal lorry, been in contact with the village school at Shipcott to enrol Stella and Rosie; put down the deposit and signed a rental agreement with their new landlady. It will probably be the longest year of her life, but she has to hope that the rise in the London property market will make it possible to sell for a higher price the following year, and escape.
As Lottie lopes along, her wedding ring falls off her finger, and rolls tinkling along the pavement before falling over onto its side. She’s tempted to leave it there, but stops herself. It’s gold, and she’ll probably end up selling it.
3
One Bungalow Deep in Village Idiots
Lying on his bed, Xan is woken from his stupor by the tread of heavy feet banging up and down. What the fuck? Is it the bailiffs returning again? Then he remembers, groaning. Today is the day he must leave home.
Xan’s life is ruined. There’s no point in lying to himself that it isn’t.
All through secondary school he had been told he was ‘Oxbridge material’, and he’d been foolish enough to believe it. He’d applied to read English at Cambridge, and when he visited, he fell in love with it. To fall in love with a place can be just as rapturous and all-consuming as to fall in love with a person. As the rows between his mother and stepfather grew increasingly intrusive, all he could think of was how much he wanted out. He’d got the standard offer of two A*s and an A, and had been confident that he’d worked hard enough to make it.
Only when he logged on to discover his results, he found that instead he had got one A* and two As. Nothing would budge Cambridge. He had failed.
It hurt so badly that he thought he’d never recover. People talked about being disappointed in love, but this was far worse. It meant nothing to him that even his stepfather told him that Oxbridge was overrated and that he should take up any one of his other choices: Cambridge was everything. He’s withdrawn from the UCAS system, and spends most of the time in his bedroom with giant headphones hugging his ears so that he can’t hear people shouting, knocking on his door or calling to ask how he is.
Now he’s being moved to the countryside, and it’s all Quentin’s fault.
He’s furious at his own gullibility, as well as his mother’s.
‘I still love him,’ she wept, when he asked why she didn’t divorce him immediately. ‘You don’t suddenly stop loving someone because they’ve done something awful. It’s not like turning off a tap. He’s suffering too.’
‘Is he?’ Xan asked. ‘I’m glad.’
At least when Quentin went off to his job in America, they’d had some peace. Life had been, if not happy, then less disturbing. Xan can’t believe that Lottie has let him return. Why doesn’t she just throw him out? But they all have to go on living together in the country. It’s like an awful joke.
His mobile vibrates. ‘What?’
‘Alexander?’
Xan tries to snap out of his haze.
‘Oma.
Hi.’
‘Darling! How are you?’
Xan sighs. Everyone keeps asking him this. He loves his grandmother, who is a crazy German pianist, but OK. If only he and Mum could go back to living with her!
‘Surviving.’
‘If you get a job, you could go travelling.’
As if, Xan thinks. ‘Look, Oma, I must go now.’
Lottie’s voice comes up the stairs, ‘Xan! We are leaving in ONE HOUR!’
When she uses that special shriek, it goes through him like a pneumatic drill.
‘Promise me you will stop being so hard on yourself, and do something practical,’ Oma says.
‘The packers are coming.’
He heaves himself off his bed and opens his window, waving at the tell-tale smell of weed just because he knows it will worry Lottie more. He knows what the countryside is like because ever since Quentin came along they have gone there to spend Boxing Day with Quentin’s parents, who live in what Quentin calls The Hovel, or the coldest cottage on Dartmoor.
‘It can’t be that bad, can it?’ said Bron, and Dylan asked, ‘Don’t millions of people go there on holiday?’
‘There is absolutely nothing to do there except watch TV and get pissed. It’s basically all tiny villages one bungalow deep in village idiots, and old people waiting to die.’
Neither Bron nor Dylan had ever been into the countryside: why bother? For £30, you could catch a flight to somewhere abroad. Xan has looked at where they’re going to live on Google Earth, and the Devon and Cornwall peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic like the deformed trotter of a pig. Nobody in their right mind would want to go there.
‘Promise you’ll come and visit.’
‘It’s, like, a long way away,’ said Dylan.
‘Maybe in summer,’ said Bron. It’s as much as any of them can manage just to get to Camden Lock by public transport, and Xan knows they never will.
‘XAN! XAN! We are LEAVING!’
Lottie has already shouted at him that morning for not closing down his Netflix account.
‘Don’t you understand, we just can’t afford anything?’
‘It’s only £6 a month.’
‘You pay for it, then. Get a job.’
‘How the hell am I going to find a job in the country when I don’t know anyone?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. There must be some farmer or something who’d like an extra pair of hands.’
‘Mum, Devon’s full of white people. They’ll probably turn their dogs on me.’
They’ve seen Home Farm already, so he knows it’s even worse than The Hovel. It had taken four hours to drive there, five to get back. There is a tiny village which has one shop. Even Exeter, the kind of provincial city where everyone is a screaming toff, is forty-five minutes away along the A30. The house is beyond awful. Its living room has one sofa and two armchairs, upholstered in a sort of brown fake leather like giant turds. There is only terrestrial TV.
‘You aren’t seriously suggesting we live with this?’ he shouted.
‘The furniture can be stored, if you wish to bring your own,’ said the agent, a bloke who didn’t seem to realise that tweed was weird, but Mum said No, that they were letting out their own home.
In the whole place there was only one item which they would ever have considered having at home. An upright piano loomed out of one corner of the living room, showing its teeth like a dog unsure whether it is smiling or snarling.
‘A Bösendorfer,’ Lottie remarked.
‘Is that good?’
‘Yes. Not a Steinway, but still good.’
Xan sat down on the stool, and played a few chords.
‘Fucked, like everything else in my life.’
To his surprise, Quentin said to the agent,
‘We’d expect the piano to be retuned.’
‘I’m sure the owners will agree,’ the estate agent said, making a note.
‘I don’t like it,’ Stella whispered. ‘It’s ugly, Mummy.’
‘Oh, we’ll make it nice, don’t worry.’ Lottie answered. ‘We can put a swing in the tree!’
‘Can we get a dog? Or a cat?’
‘I’m allergic to cats, remember?’ Xan said, indignant.
‘But what about all my toys?’ Rosie asked.
‘Nothing important will be left behind. It’ll be fun!’
She talks about it back in London as if they’ll all be prancing about like the Von Trapp Family.
There is a tentative knock on his bedroom door.
‘WAIT!’ he roars.
The screech of duct tape sounds as if his home is being tortured. Xan glares at a poster of Amy Winehouse on his walls, drags his fingers through his corkscrewing hair and sits up just as the door is flung open.
‘Ew,’ says Stella primly. ‘It reeks.’
‘I didn’t invite you in.’
‘Mum says you have to come. Do you have any clothes on yet, or are you naked as a newborn babe striding the blast?’
Stella has been at a prep school notorious for super-achievers, she’s taught herself French by listening to audiobooks at night, and how on earth is she going to cope at an ordinary primary? Rose won’t be a problem, everyone likes her, but Stella has Quentin’s quizzical sharpness and Lottie’s fierce intelligence in her pale pointed face. Xan can see how tense she is.
‘Hug?’
He loves his little sisters, the only good thing to have come out of this clusterfuck. Wrapped in his arms, Stella perks up a little.
‘Mum says Rosie and I are going to have a tree house.’
‘Great, we can take up full-time residence in it.’
‘Dad is going to grow our vegetables. I quite like carrots …’
They still adore their father. Xan can’t believe he was ever as innocent as his little sisters. They see only the unpredictable, warm, charismatic man who makes everything fun. When Quentin wants to charm you it takes a superhuman effort to resist, even when you can see what he’s up to.
Thud, thud, thud. The packers are huge, cheerful Australians who manhandle the boxes downstairs as if they were filled with foam. When the removal lorry roars off, the house seems like a ghost of itself.
‘You can all bring just one bag in the car,’ Lottie says, ticking off a list. Her face is as pale as paper. ‘Xan, have you got your Ventolin on you?’
Xan grunts.
‘Well, at least country air will be good for your lungs.’
‘You know that I’m hating every minute of this?’ he says. ‘London is my home.’
Mum says, with a sad little laugh, ‘I’m sure you’ll be back soon.’
The Multipla is stuffed to the ceiling. Mum is driving it, at least until halfway, when Dud will take over. From now on, everything is divided equally. Mum will cook for half the week while Dud washes up, and then they’ll swap. Everyone will clean their own rooms, and everyone is responsible for their own laundry. Xan barely knows how to put a wash in a washing machine, he’s never used a Dyson.
London is trickling away. Cars, road, supermarkets, churches, houses, cars, road, trees, road, hills, more and more of them, occasionally dotted with sheep or cows. This is all vaguely, drearily familiar. Beside him, Rosie wriggles, and over the unctuous tones of Stephen Fry reading another Harry Potter audiobook he can hear the inevitable complaint about needing the toilet.
‘Hang on, sweetheart.’
They pull over at a service station just before Bristol. Xan is left with Quentin, who sips the coffee he has bought for himself.
‘Disgusting,’ he says. ‘Now I know why Socrates preferred death to exile. Still, at least I’m getting a column out of it. The Questing Vole. After—’
‘Waugh, I know,’ says Xan, bristling. His stepfather’s appetite for turning life into journalism has always irritated him.
‘It will be,’ says Quentin, ‘a single Malteser on top of a pile of dung.’
Lottie is returning from the toilets, dragging the two girls along with her and looking unutterably
weary. All his life, she’s taken care of them by nagging and organising and often it’s driven him mad, but maybe it’s just how she gets things done. She once told him that every time she looked at a new building, all she could think of was the trouble it must have caused.
‘Why?’
‘Because everything, down to the last door handle, will have had to be imagined and designed and ordered by someone,’ she said. ‘Nothing just happens, Xan. Buildings don’t grow like trees. You spend weeks and months and years working to get it all right, in every detail, and it never is.’
Maybe this is why Lottie is such a control freak, Xan thinks; she wants perfection and can’t have it. Even now, it turns out she’s remembered to make sandwiches for everyone so they don’t have to be bought from the service station. She tries so hard, he thinks, and nobody ever gives her anything in return.
‘Hold on, will you?’ he says to his stepfather, and darts off. A supermarket franchise is selling roses for £3. Xan chooses a bunch that is bright yellowy orange, with reddish tips like flames. When Lottie returns, he thrusts them at her.
‘For me?’ she asks, surprise and pleasure illuminating her face.
‘Yes,’ he says, and turns away before she can hug him. It’s the last of his money.
‘Will it be cold and stinky, like Grandpa and Grandma’s?’ Stella asks.
‘Not at all. The landlord is giving us a year’s supply of logs to burn,’ Lottie says.
Whoever the landlords are, they must be bloody desperate to get Home Farm occupied, Xan thinks. I wonder why.
4
Everything Has to Be So Slow
Self-pity is a trait which Quentin despises, and yet it’s hard not to feel that his life has taken a turn for the worse.
What is wrong with country people? Why can’t they move faster, and get on? As a child here, it seemed normal to have adults sleepwalking through life; as a teenager he had been shielded from rustic torpor by the wild eccentricities of school; and as an adult he had escaped. But on his way to see his parents before catching the train back to London, he is almost bursting out of his skin with impatience.
