by Amanda Craig
‘But how are you feeling?’ they kept asking, as if she were the victim of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. The temptation to enjoy the sympathy of strangers was easier to resist, but even Hemani, who had been through a difficult divorce herself, recommended Lottie keep her lips buttoned.
‘Don’t tell people anything. Keep your dignity.’
Even if Lottie were not inclined to do this anyway, she has to protect Stella and Rosie. For them, she has to not shout, not cry, not express her contempt or blacken Quentin’s name further – because he is still their father, and always will be. Yet Xan is just as angry and upset, and in many ways this worries her more.
Lottie knows that her husband no longer gives a damn for his stepson, if he ever did, whereas Xan truly loved him and looked up to him. Now, they lock horns like stags every day.
‘Fuck off, Dud’ is how he always ends rows with Quentin. ‘What do you know, old man?’
‘I just have to keep going,’ she tells herself every morning, when the fear and despair rise up. ‘Don’t look back, and don’t look ahead.’
The winter is forecast to be particularly cold, and in January the whole round of tax, insurance, heating oil and so on begins again. Lottie has just £200 of savings left. The £33.70 a week child benefit for Stella and Rosie, which she applied for once she and Quentin both lost their jobs, is now crucial. Quentin contributes £100 a week for his part – but it doesn’t seem to occur to him to do more.
The person who does is Xan.
‘Mum, I got my first pay packet, and I thought, maybe, would £70 rent be OK?’
‘Let me hug you,’ she says, and for the briefest moment, he allows this. It’s such an unfamiliar feeling now to hold him in her arms – to hold any man in her arms – and it gives her a jolt of pleasure. Adolescence has swept over him like a wave, leaving him solid and shining. Somehow, her limp, fair, Anglo-German genes and his African father’s have merged to produce a being whose tall, strong, perfectly proportioned body and face is not just a mixture of races but something better than either.
‘Is it really enough?’
‘Yes – yes,’ she says. ‘It’s fantastic. My redundancy money is gone and – thank you.’
By December, the sun seems to have sunk to a smouldering ember. Frosts turn long grass the colour of old hair, and the east wind whines through all but the thickest hedgerows. At night there are no lights other than stars, and the odd car slowly traversing the flank of a faraway hill. They have nothing to look forward to but cold and dark and quarrelling; and as soon as the girls are at school, it breaks out in earnest.
The depths of nastiness to which two people who once loved each other can sink is not edifying. Each is, by the end of the day, exhausted.
‘You have absolutely no idea how much I despise you,’ she says to him, after one such round.
‘I couldn’t care less.’
That’s the trouble: in the beginning, everyone is encased in a bubble, like the angelic young lovers in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. But inside this bubble are also two animals, lusting, mistrusting, terrified, and equipped with sharp elbows and sharper claws, and eventually the bubble must split into two, or pop. Lottie knows that Quentin must fantasise about her death, just as she fantasises about Quentin suddenly dropping dead. Imagine, she thinks, if instead of paying £500 an hour to a lawyer I could simply become a widow, with the mortgage paid off by life insurance … The whole experience is making her feel like a character in the most vulgar kind of soap opera.
So much of the nastiness seems to revolve around money. She isn’t earning: Quentin is. She had no deposit to put down on their house: Quentin did. He has profited from his mistake and she has been ground down by it. Over and over, their quarrels seem to be, not about the grand operatic aspects of betrayal but about whose turn it is to pay for petrol. It’s the same for Janet with her Awful Ex.
‘He wouldn’t give us any money to live on.’
‘Surely you could have demanded child maintenance from him?’
‘No. I didn’t want his name on her birth certificate. She’s mine. But look—’ She fiddles with her mouth and suddenly, horrifyingly, her face falls in like an old woman’s.
‘That’s why I have no teeth,’ Janet says. ‘I couldn’t afford a dentist, so I had all my top teeth out.’
‘Oh,’ Lottie says, faintly. ‘That must have been very painful.’
‘It was, but not as bad as what he did.’
‘I’m glad you got away, to a better life,’ Lottie says.
‘She’s mine now, all mine, and he’s gone to Hell.’
‘Was he violent to you?’
‘No.’ Janet’s face closes. ‘He was a bastard, though.’
Lottie trudges along the long drive to the road to fetch the girls from school. She passes strange people on her walks, for the countryside is never as empty as it looks. There’s a man, a real gypsy with a horse and bender, who camps by the verges sometimes. She always smiles at him, a little nervously because she is after all a woman on her own and he looks odd; he nods but never speaks. There’s a farmer who must be local, riding high in his tractor, who often shouts something incomprehensible, but apparently cordial. There are numerous people commuting to and from work, delivering things or removing them: rubbish collections, supermarkets, online orders and then the kind of things that you never see in the city, like livestock and feed and raw materials, all travelling along these narrow little roads with their high hedges and poor surfaces. Sam the postie is the friendliest, though he’s also odd – he always wears shorts, and someone at the village school told her he’s done time for GBH. All kinds of people live down here, from web designers to white witches. Sally has told her that this part of Devon is ‘poorer than Romania’, and it’s easy to believe.
A veil of light rain hangs in the west, drifting slowly towards her; she hopes she’ll get the girls home before it arrives. Being so close to the sea fills the air with radiance; it’s never entirely dark outside during the day, though the nights are the blackest imaginable, filled with a silence that is not silence but the creak of boughs and the drip of damp. She is continually astonished by the trees, each of which is beginning to assume a distinct personality even if she doesn’t know what they are. Landscaping for her has always been about drawing computer-aided saplings in raised concrete boxes, not the enormous, irregular presences which punctuate hedgerows, lean out of giant stone walls or swarm down valleys. The large black-tipped one close to the house, which Quentin says is an ash, is the most sinister, and when its claws dance against the sky it looks as if it’s exulting over something dreadful.
‘Settled in at the place, have you? Everything all right?’ the other mothers ask.
There are a number of single mothers collecting their kids, even if some have partners. To be married before you have a family is an exception: people here wait until they have children so they can have bridesmaids, if they bother at all. While the women all have jobs in cleaning, catering or caring, the men seem more likely to be unemployed.
‘That’s why there are so many tattoo parlours,’ one remarks.
‘Course I wouldn’t mind getting married, but only to a man who worked hard,’ says another.
‘And who took off his dirty boots when he came home,’ added a third, and they laugh, as if to say that such a creature would be impossible to find.
Their children seem friendly, healthy and sensible: Lottie remembers how, at Stella’s seventh birthday in London, one after another of the little girls who came refused to eat any cake but asked for it in a party bag, ‘to eat later’. Already on the verge of anorexia, they had never played games, preferring to have ‘makeovers’ with their own cosmetics. Stella hadn’t liked them either, but she’s almost as angry with their new life as Quentin.
‘It’s so boring! There’s nothing to do. I hate, hate my new school.’
Matters came to a head after two boys marched her over to the goal at break ti
me, and tied her to one post by her long fair plaits before aiming footballs at her. Stella, unsurprisingly, burst into angry tears. The first Lottie learns of it is when summoned by Miss Anstey.
‘I tried not to mind, Mummy, but the ball hit me in the face.’
Lottie, trembling with protective rage, glares at the boys, whose shock of blond hair is obviously inherited from their mother.
‘You know that we don’t find this kind of behaviour acceptable,’ says the head.
The boys’ mother, a tall and unexpectedly pretty woman in a turquoise raincoat and bright pink wellington boots, bursts out, ‘Dexter, Tiger, I’m ashamed of you guys. Say sorry right now.’
Lottie notes the Australian accent with surprise.
‘Sorry,’ the smaller of the two mutters. The elder boy kicks him.
‘They can say it, but they won’t mean it,’ Stella says fiercely.
Miss Anstey says, ‘What you must do, Dexter, and you too Tiger, is to write a letter of apology, and give it to Stella tomorrow. One whole page each.’
The boys’ faces fall in almost comical dismay. ‘If they do give me a letter, I’ll tear it up,’ Stella says.
‘See what I mean, Mum?’ says Dexter. ‘Even if we write a letter, it won’t do no good.’
‘It won’t do any good,’ Stella corrects.
‘I’ll say no good if I want to, snotty,’ says the boy.
Stella stamps her foot. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’
‘Oh dear,’ Lottie says. She exchanges a glance with the boys’ mother, who rolls her eyes.
‘My guilt glands are going into overdrive,’ the woman says. ‘They’ve got their dad’s temper.’
‘All the more reason for them to learn to control it,’ Miss Anstey remarks.
‘It’s very wrong to hurt people,’ Lottie says. ‘But correcting people’s grammar is very aggravating, Stella.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Good on you, Stella,’ says the boys’ mother. ‘I’m Di Tore.’ She adds, as an apparent afterthought, ‘You’re our tenants at Home Farm, aren’t you?’
Lottie says awkwardly, ‘Yes.’
Di Tore and Miss Anstey exchange a wordless communication.
‘Listen, why don’t you bring your kids to my place for tea?’ Di’s smile is disarming. ‘Go on. I’m dying to talk to a grown-up, and I’ve never seen a kid yet didn’t make up over pizza.’
‘I’ve got my other daughter, too. She’s waiting outside.’
‘Oh, bring her too,’ Di says. ‘She’s in the same class as Tiger, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah,’ says the younger boy, adding pointedly; ‘Rosie’s OK.’
Lottie hesitates, but despite Stella’s angry grimaces she is intrigued; besides, what is there waiting for her at Home Farm but loneliness?
‘We walk, and it’ll be dark soon.’
‘I’ve got the car,’ Di says. ‘I’ll drive you there and back.’
Lottie agrees, and the tension lessens.
‘I don’t want to go to Dexter’s manky house,’ Stella says, as soon as the Tores go off to open up a large Toyota jeep.
‘They’ve got a ginormous TV,’ Rosie pipes up. ‘Plus an indoor swimming pool.’
‘Oh, wow,’ says Stella, sarcastically; but Lottie can see her wavering.
In Di’s car, it only takes minutes to get to the Tores’ drive, which has a Gothic Gingerbread-style gatehouse by its entrance. Lottie has hardly noticed it before.
‘That looks like a witch’s cottage,’ Stella says.
‘It’s where Janet and her daughter live,’ Di says. ‘She cleans for you, doesn’t she?’
‘We don’t like her,’ Rosie announces.
‘Witch,’ whispers Dexter, and the children all giggle, as trees swish past.
The road goes over two cattle grids and a stream, then a line of shrubs, and an orchard, and another drive. After a few minutes, a broad curl of gravel reveals a big white house ablaze with light. Lottie stares at its towers, its battlements, its ogee windows and its twisted chimney pots: Shipcott Manor is Strawberry Hill Gothic. The architect in her is thrilled.
‘Come in,’ Di says, over the bark of a dog. She opens the heavy oak door, which is unlocked. ‘Don’t be afraid of Bluebell. He’s very gentle.’
A lean black hound comes up to them, sniffs, then trots away and lies down by the fire crackling in the hall.
Rosie says, ‘May I pat him?’
‘Yes,’ Di says. ‘Now, I’m putting tea in the oven. Maybe you’d like a swim before?’
‘They haven’t brought costumes,’ Lottie says, but Di says,
‘We’ve got dozens for visitors, haven’t we boys?’
Dexter and Tiger nod.
Stella says, ‘Is there really a pool?’
‘Yes,’ Dexter says. ‘With a wave machine.’
‘Cool!’
The children dart off. Di leads Lottie past a high-ceilinged drawing room with exquisite white mouldings and a reassuringly vulgar leopard-print carpet, and into the kitchen. Here, banks of gleaming steel machines are interleaved with hand-crafted oak cabinets, all with pointed Gothic doors, and French windows giving onto a wide terrace, landscaped gardens and a view of Dartmoor, dyed by the sunset.
‘Spectacular.’
‘Yeah, well I told Gore that if I had to live in this country, I needed as much light as possible,’ Di says.
‘Who’s your architect?’
‘We got a local guy, Martin Briars?’
‘Oh!’ Lottie says in surprise. ‘I know him. At least, I used to, if it’s the same one.’
Di laughs. She is like the many tall vases of white narcissi all around the room, and even prettier than first realised. Lottie has a vague feeling she might once have been a model.
‘Are you OK in that house? We didn’t really do anything to it, I’m afraid. Home Farm came with the estate, and we thought it might be useful as a holiday rental, but it’s never really been sorted. I don’t suppose you are interested in buying it?’
Lottie shrugs apologetically. ‘We have to sell our own home in London first.’
Di goes to an enormous corner fridge, and opens it. ‘Wine, beer, juice …?’
‘Well, maybe just one glass of red.’
‘OK! I knew you were a red wine girl. So, what are you actually doing here?’
Lottie shrugs, warily. ‘Waiting for the recession to pass.’
‘Your husband’s that journalist, isn’t he? I used to see him on TV.’
Lottie nods, and looks towards the sun. It’s sinking so fast that only a streak of gold is left.
‘I haven’t been this warm since we arrived,’ she says, shedding her fleece. (Later, when she goes to the loo, she is shocked by her haggard, unkempt reflection.) ‘Why are you here?’
‘Gordon is a Devon boy, and he thought our kids should be raised here.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Yeah, but I do miss the Aussie weather, and Gore is always on tour,’ Di says. ‘I love this house and that little school is a gem – but the weather here is for ducks.’
‘When does it stop raining?’
‘July. For about three days.’
The children come in, damp and exuberant, to devour pizza and ice cream then retreat to the other end of the room, where a giant screen descends from its invisible recess in the ceiling. No wonder they don’t miss London, Lottie thinks. A gust of wind rattles rain on the thick glass. The dog, which has been lying quietly, raises its head expectantly, and then subsides, sighing.
Di says, ‘Bluebell misses Oliver, the guy who used to live in Home Farm.’
‘He left his dog behind? As well as his piano?’
‘He couldn’t help it.’
‘Why not?’ Lottie asks, though she already senses the answer.
‘He died.’
‘Oh.’ Lottie can see a strange expression on Di’s face. ‘Was it sudden?’
‘Very.’ She can see Di deciding to tell her something unpleasant. ‘
He was murdered.’
‘What?’
They are both whispering, though the children are absorbed in the film.
‘Not in the house. But outside.’
Lottie is stunned. A thousand questions rise to her lips.
‘Did they find who did it?’
‘No.’
‘What was done to him?’
‘You don’t want to know, trust me.’
‘No, no I do!’
‘Someone cut off his head with an axe. It was horrible. We were in Oz for Christmas, but the papers were all over us because of the connection.’
A burning knot of fear twists itself in Lottie’s stomach. It’s irrational, and yet she feels, deep down, as if this confirms something she half-sensed.
‘Is that why the rent is so low?’
‘Well … It’s not always easy to rent a remote property … and I guess a lot of people knew, so I suppose so. Oh,’ says Di; ‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘No, honestly. I’d rather know. I’d have found out anyway.’
She thinks, Quentin will blame me for this. I found the house.
‘Normally, this is one of the safest parts of the UK to live, I promise.’
‘And they’ve found nobody?’
‘No, and no head either. Just the axe, which had no fingerprints. Nobody saw anyone arrive or leave, the weather was bad, nobody came by until the postie did.’
There’s an uncomfortable silence. Di says,
‘We took his dog in. Poor beast. I hope it doesn’t affect the way you feel about living there.’
‘Even if we were superstitious, we can’t afford to give up the lease.’
I mustn’t tell the children, and especially not Quentin, she thinks. It’ll just be an excuse to leave, and then I’ll be completely alone here. She shivers.
‘What do you think the reason for it was?’
‘A burglary gone wrong? Though nothing was taken, that anyone could tell. He had almost nothing apart from his piano. A lunatic? The whole thing was completely weird. Mind you, the police down here are a joke.’
