by Amanda Craig
Xan can’t help flushing with delight.
‘Really?’
Katya gazes at him with her slanting eyes. ‘You are not like the others.’
Xan doesn’t want to think about the others, though he knows there must have been at least one.
‘Well, I’m very glad you like me,’ he says, shyly. ‘I like you too.’
‘I am a good Catholic girl,’ she says giggling; and it’s true in that she and the others go to the small Catholic church every Sunday to take Mass, like all the Poles. Afterwards, they sit around the tiny kitchen table, drinking beer and eating the rich, spicy food that is always freshly made.
‘One day, you Polish will be the ones employing us, I expect,’ he tells Katya.
‘Maybe,’ she says, wryly. ‘In one hundred years. There is no work there.’
When Xan returns to Home Farm, he’s startled by how different it all is. There are books on the shelves, framed pictures on the walls, Le Creuset pots, newspapers, shabby clothes, and an attitude of self-conscious, mildly apologetic irony and entitlement. How has he never seen this before?
‘Katya is amazing. She’s had to struggle for everything.’
‘Do you think Oma didn’t, after the war?’
‘Yes, only that was different, surely.’
‘I don’t somehow think your Polish friends had to eat rats and hide from Russian rapists,’ Lottie answers dryly.
‘I don’t think the Poles had it easy either, Mum. And then they had to live under communism.’
Quentin calls him ‘cunt-struck’.
‘Just look at his expression,’ he says, on the rare occasion when they are eating together and he sees Xan staring into space. ‘Like a duck in a thunderstorm.’
‘What does a duck in a thunderstorm look like, Daddy?’ Stella enquires.
‘Like your brother.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Lottie says fiercely. ‘Just because Xan is—’
‘Pas devant les enfants.’
‘Pourquoi pas?’ Stella demands. Xan groans aloud. ‘Nous avons déjà vu les érotomanes sur l’ordinateur, haven’t we Rosie?’
‘Stella!’ Lottie says, appalled. ‘Have you been teaching yourself French?’
‘She downloaded it ages ago.’
‘You’d be lucky to find anything on broadband this slow,’ says Quentin.
Home Farm has other problems. The scurrying under the floorboards has become bolder, and now they’ve all seen mice scuttling under furniture.
‘We’ve got to get rid of them before my mother and your parents come for Christmas,’ Lottie says.
‘Oh, must they?’
‘Yes. They are your parents.’
‘Why must I?’ Quentin launches into his familiar rant. ‘Marta’s living all on her own up in a vast six-bedroomed house in Hampstead worth millions while we’re slumming it here.’
‘It’s her home. You can’t ask her to sell up just so we can have a better life.’
‘That’s the problem with the property market in this country,’ Quentin says. ‘If it weren’t for old ladies rattling round enormous houses, there’d be no housing crisis.’
‘We like Oma, don’t we, Xan?’
‘Yes,’ says Xan, yawning, and glaring at his stepfather.
I must send my UCAS form off, he thinks, hazily, but that life of study and lectures is increasingly remote to him. Whenever he starts to think of his future Katya’s image interrupts it.
‘You like this? You like it?’ she whispers, and he murmurs over and over, ‘Yes.’
‘Xan? Xan,’ his mother says patiently. He wakes up with a start.
‘Xan, Oma is coming to spend Christmas with us, and I would like you to be awake for her.’
‘I could stay at Katya’s.’
‘No, I’m sorry, Xan, that won’t do. Family is family, I want you to be here. She’s coming down to see you as much as anyone.’
Xan sighs, and agrees. He does love Oma, even though he resents any time away from Katya.
Christmas decorations are going up everywhere, and Mum has gone into her usual annual frenzy.
‘But Lottie, do you know what a Nordstrom costs?’ Quentin interjects.
‘Oh God!’ Lottie clutches her head in her hands. ‘We must have a tree.’
Christmas with his family is a big deal. No matter how cynical Xan feels he has become, he can’t suppress a little throb of joy when he sees the familiar decorations. He’d been wondering whether Mum had remembered to pack them, but of course she has. There are the fragile bubbles of red, green, gold and blue, the carved wooden angels, the twisted glass icicles, the pressed tin snowflakes, the glittering silver pears, the tiny birds with real feathers, the gilded Venetian glass sweets which will be mixed with real foil-wrapped chocolates. Right at the top of the tree goes a smiling gold sun, because it is the return of light and life, rather than the Christian ceremony, which they celebrate. Every year, they are put away as things that are no longer remarkable, and every year they are unwrapped as rediscovered treasures, saturated in nostalgia.
‘I’ve been making your presents at school.’
‘So have I,’ says Rosie,
‘Only mine’s better.’
‘Thank you darlings.’
‘I intend to spend the whole of the festive season in an alcoholic stupor.’
‘It can’t be as bad as last Christmas,’ Xan says to his stepfather.
‘Why not?’
‘Last Christmas was when you came back.’
12
Quentin’s Hellish Hols
Adultery, like misery, loves company.
Quentin stays in London as long as he can, the excuse being that he must attend as many Christmas parties as possible, for professional reasons. In reality, as Lottie and he know perfectly well, it’s about escape. He hates Home Farm, hates the mice and mud, the darkness shivering with stars, the loneliness. He hates being middle-aged, hurtling towards decrepitude, and the only thing that had cheered him up was having affairs. Why can’t Lottie understand that? He never wanted this hideous, unending warfare, he doesn’t want to lose his daughters or his home, but ever since he turned fifty some kind of chemical reaction has been going on inside him for which he really isn’t responsible. He still can’t really understand why she is taking it all so personally.
‘It’s just sex,’ he’s tried saying. ‘It’s not love.’
But like most women, she can’t distinguish between the two. Women, especially ones like his wife, are so binary, so black and white, either/or. Lottie can’t see that people are messy, that they blunder around making the wrong choices or even no choices. She thinks happiness is a question of choice, rather than luck. Being punished by provincial life makes it no better, not unless his wife thinks he should shag sheep instead.
Yet whenever he returns to London, it feels like revisiting the scene of a catastrophe.
He’s been to a handful of Christmas parties, but especially the Chronicle’s. This is held every year in one of the great Pall Mall clubs. Passing between its flaming torches is like being returned to life as it should be, crammed with interesting, clever, stylish people all talking, laughing and drinking twice as fast as civilians. The Chronicle has always thrown the best do – it’s one reason why it gets away with paying its contributors so little – and under Ivo’s editorship it is even more lavish than before, with champagne and canapés, instead of the usual white wine and crisps. People dress up for it, look forward to it, and of course attempt to crash it, but Quentin’s stiff thick white card means he is still a player. He deposits his raincoat in the cloakroom, rubbing shoulders immediately with half a dozen acquaintances, and seizes a glass filled with what tastes like almost neat gin. The sound of a good newspaper party is a kind of roaring tinkle, as if a dozen chandeliers are scattering rainbows of merriment, and when he hears it he almost snorts in his eagerness to get into the room.
At the top of the wide marble stairs, sleek and affable, is Ivo Sponge, now disgusting
ly rich and well-suited. Without his influence and encouragement, Ivo would never even have gone into journalism, yet now his former protégé is one of the leading lights of his generation. He hesitates, for there is no knowing what success will do to anyone. Ivo, however, beams at Quentin.
‘Hello old chap!’
‘You look well,’ says Quentin – meaning, fat. Ivo answers,
‘It’s just like what Schopenhauer said: “Getting married is like being asked to put one’s arm in a sack full of snakes and being expected to extract an eel.” Luckily, I got the eel.’
Ivo’s wife is beautiful, wealthy, and for some mysterious reason adores him as much as he does her. Consequently, Ivo’s nature has expanded almost as much as his waistline. That is the single most irritating feature of seeing your friends succeed, Quentin thinks: they can afford to be kind. They get nicer, and more popular, while you spend your remaining energy trying not to be bitter. Inside, he sees many old faces but an alarming number of new ones. Who are all these people? Were he still employed, he would be besieged by the many single women shimmering round the room in their glittering black cocktail dresses, but news of his troubles has spread far and wide.
Many actually turn their back on him, to his anger and surprise.
What started out as an exciting re-entry to his old life rapidly becomes an exercise in mortification. Despite the encouragement of other serial shaggers (who are ominously keen for him to ‘live your life’, i.e., join them in the Shed of Doom), most former colleagues avoid him. Even people he thought he liked, and who liked him, steer clear. It isn’t only professional: some of them had liked Lottie, and taken her side, the women especially. Women do tend to gang up against an errant husband, whether from genuine sympathy or because they don’t want another unattached female on the circuit he can never tell; and as journalism has become worse-paid, so it is dominated by the opposite sex. He can feel that they don’t want to acknowledge his presence, avoiding eye-contact or moving quietly away when he tries to approach – presumably in case he asks them for work. He chats, or rather shouts, to the few whose faces he remembers even if he can’t recall most of their names, but he can see that they don’t really want to waste any time on him. Why should they, after all? Few people return favours in professional life, particularly if you are no longer powerful.
A few feet away, he can see Cecilia, his former mistress. She was once in love with him, and he had very nearly left Lottie for her, but now, looking at her, he feels not a flicker. She’s very pretty, but, he thinks, more like a lapdog than a woman; it’s clear she now hates him for not loving her in return. Is he to blame for this? No, a part of him responds, but he certainly is to blame for seducing her when he was married, and she a vulnerable intern.
The gin makes his head spin, and he feels unpleasantly hot. The walls, hung with luxuriant crimson damask, look as if they’re on fire. Other men shout about their own dire experiences in the family courts, and how broken these have left them. The noise is so loud that they can bellow out the most gruesome details in complete confidence that nobody else will understand a word. On blasts of stress-soured breath, Quentin hears about their grand passion, their hopeless boredom, their betrayal.
‘You only get one life, so why stay with a person you don’t love?’
The person who bellows this in his face is a plum-faced drunk. Quentin can’t remember his name, but he’s so hideous that it’s hard to believe any woman would touch him, or that if one did, he’d ever want to let her go.
Worst of all is when Mimi lurches over.
‘What happened to you?’ she keeps saying, almost in tears. ‘You’re like Aslan on the slab.’
Quentin feels sick. Mimi was once like a lovely flower, and his editorial assistant. A nice woman, clever, funny – and she probably wasted the best years of her life by being with him. Mimi will probably never find a husband now, never have a family, both of which she longs for, because she wasted that crucial window of time between twenty-nine and thirty-five, pining after him. He manages to get away, furious with her, furious with himself. Circulate, circulate, that was the rule. Civilians who hated hacks never understood that they were not (as a rule) vicious or unkind, simply pragmatic. Everything was work. You drank not to get drunk or because you were thirsty but because it gave you an excuse to move on to the next bit of gossip; and in this world, gossip is the only currency that matters. Most of it is about adultery and affairs. Who is sleeping with whom, who is no longer sleeping with whom, who has taken out an injunction and why, these are (to the sharp-witted) far more important than party politics or news stories.
He finds himself talking to a man who seems to know a great deal about his career.
Soothed by being recognised, he says at last, ‘I’m sorry, you are—?’
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ the man says. ‘I’m your agent.’
Half a lifetime ago, Quentin dashed off a couple of non-fiction books; one, featuring interviews with famous people, had done quite well. His agent for this had been a thin young man with a thick head of hair. Now, he is portly and bald as an egg.
‘Of course I do,’ he lies.
‘So, how is life in the Wild West? Any interesting people your way?’
Nettled, Quentin finds himself talking about Gore Tore, implying that they are not only neighbours but bosom friends; bragging being the first rule of journalism.
‘Really? The most famous rock star in the world, and you land up on his doorstep,’ says his agent in some excitement. ‘This is splendid, Quentin! You know Tore’s never given an interview? The last of the greats … just think of all the stories there. I could get you serious money for a biography.’
Quentin can’t think of anything more demeaning.
‘I’m not a music journalist. I have a Name. I’m not a bloody ghostwriter.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Think about it. This could be your big comeback.’
The idea that a rock star’s biography could count as such depresses him. It’s no good telling himself that everyone else is also staring down the same twin barrels of redundancy and penury: they live in London, not exile. His Questing Vole column has already been cut twice, from 1000 words to 800 and now to 650, with his fee reduced accordingly. Like everyone, he’s working twice as hard for half the money, but there are limits.
The next day, after a somewhat bilious night on Tina’s barge, Quentin goes shopping. Now that he has to buy his own gifts, it’s almost worth having a wife just to do Christmas. All around him other haggard, near-hysterical men are also completing their desperate contributions to Mammon and Guilt just before the shops close. He can afford presents only because he has vented his spleen about the festivities for a tabloid which actually pays properly in return for putting his prose through the mangle of its house style, a sacrifice he now has to accept. He buys half a dozen sparkling things from Accessorize for the girls, some Top Man vouchers for Xan, books for his parents, and knows he must buy Lottie something, too. This quest is the most daunting, as she has such impossibly high aesthetic standards. Eventually, after tramping the length of Regent Street, he spots beeswax candles for £5 a pair. He knows at once she will like them, and suddenly a bristling knot of anxiety loosens in his gut.
Maybe, he thinks, I can get through this after all.
At Paddington Station, people are surging forwards and sideways at every announcement. The biannual exodus from London is in full swing, and a brass band breaks into the theme tune from The Dambusters.
‘Dear God, no,’ he mutters, but the fools actually get applause. Once, this place with its soaring glass ceilings and elegant white ironwork showed him the silhouettes of domes and spires. Now, he must turn his back on it and return to the Land that Style Forgot.
Whenever he sees someone in a tunic, jerkin and furry boots, he knows where they’re heading. What is it about the West Country that turns minds to mush? There are those who arrive in suits and change into wetsuits in the train toilet, ready f
or surfing; there are commuters getting noisily drunk, and families joining relations instead of staying sensibly apart. There are large and small dogs, children, workers, holidaymakers all crammed into Second Class, while First Class stays practically empty. It’s so crowded that he can’t get a seat until the train is past Reading. Beside him, a middle-aged couple chat to each other in a way that would be nauseating if it were at all self-conscious.
‘Only two more hours,’ the man says. ‘Do you think the hellebores are out?’
‘Not yet, but the winter jasmine might be.’
They even look similar, like dogs and their owners. Have they always been faithful? Have they never had scorching rows, or are they simply afraid of being alone?
The train rattles and squeaks its way towards the setting sun. He looks out at stiff yellow sticks of willow and the frizz of frosted fields, their puddles blinded by ice. Every hawthorn is twisted into arthritic knots, the incarnation of age and misery. Mile after mile, and he’s returning to a house which has been the scene of a murder.
A little hope returns when he thinks of the last. To hell with ghosting rock stars’ autobiographies! Failing the discovery of a cancerous lump in his body, investigating a murder is just the thing for his column. They still haven’t found his head … Disgusting, and quite what he would expect from such a location.
By now, Quentin has trawled through every website to find out more about the case. He’s read the inquest report from the Western Morning News. Oliver Randall, forty-seven, had grown up in Buckinghamshire, gone to the Royal College of Music, and emerged as a professional musician and composer. His parents were dead; he had been an only child. There’s a small biography of him online, and some signs of success, composing for a couple of one-off TV shows and the score for a film that had won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Was this how he had been able to afford to rent Home Farm? He’d moved to Devon seven years before, working as a part-time music teacher at Trelorn Secondary School. He’d been a popular teacher, expected to continue once the proposed change to Academy School status had happened.
