by Amanda Craig
‘It’s so lovely to be back.’
‘It’s my present to you, Liebchen,’ Marta says. ‘I’m only sorry dear Xan can’t come too.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be up soon,’ Lottie answers, though if she’s entirely honest she is glad to have a break from him, too.
‘Dearest Lottie,’ her cousin said the moment she called to say she was returning for a week; ‘You must, MUST come to dinner with us immediately. I can’t bear to think of you being stuck in the mud with that awful man.’
‘You could always come to us in Devon.’
‘We might descend, but you know they’d practically run us out with pitchforks,’ said Justin. ‘I grew up in the sticks, I know what country people are. They have photographs of the Queen everywhere, and not in irony.’
Lottie laughed, but when the train glides into Paddington she is overwhelmed. The graceful white wrought ironwork above the station platform looks like the outlines of gigantic flowers, leaves, hearts. It’s all so familiar, yet oddly alien. The busyness, the lights, the colour, the shops, the traffic, the sirens and the crowds almost stun her with their profligate revelry. This is life, this is youth, this is energy and success, she thinks: but is it still home?
‘Mummy, why isn’t there grass?’ Stella asks.
‘It makes it easier and cleaner for lots of people to get around,’ Lottie answers. The girls are in wellington boots, of course. They all, she realises, look faintly grubby.
‘Poor trees,’ Rosie says. ‘They live in cages.’
It is strange to see trees growing out of concrete and tarmac, surrounded by steel bars to protect them from people rather than weather. They look through the taxi windows, as it carries them towards Hampstead. The rancid air (‘What’s the nasty smell, Mummy?’ Rosie keeps asking) is unpleasant, but, Lottie tells herself, it’s the smell of a great metropolis. She’s never noticed it until now.
Stella says doubtfully, ‘London’s not clean, is it, Mummy?’
‘Ach, pollution,’ Marta croaks. ‘Heidi has a bath every day to keep her fur white.’
The dog, who sits primly on a copy of the Times between them, makes Lottie suddenly self-conscious of her unkempt appearance. The girls need new clothes, haircuts, shoes … and so does she. Above all, she must get them to the dentist. The idea of getting Devon teeth is frightful.
The minicab drives past the end of the road that leads to her old house. She is relieved to feel no pang of nostalgia. Think of the rental money, she keeps telling herself. We couldn’t afford to go on living here.
‘Home!’ Marta says with satisfaction as they turn off Hampstead High Street into a thin, elegant terrace of old brick, with a church at the end. ‘Civilisation!’
To Lottie, her mother’s home has become, after the initial rush of sentiment, annoying. Church Row is far too big for one person and Marta will not modernise anything. Its bathrooms are unheated, its lighting atrocious, and its cupboards bulge with musical scores left by her father. Lottie can barely remember him. Such memories as she has are mostly of him singing, ‘Me, me, me, me, me.’
To Marta, it’s still as if Edward Evenlode has just walked out. She will never move, not least because it represents the quintessence of Englishness, and safety to her as a refugee from post-War Berlin. To be asset-rich and cash-poor is not unusual these days, but for Lottie it’s hard not to feel slightly cross at her mother rattling around in a six-million-pound house, pleading poverty.
‘I put you in your old rooms, darlings,’ Marta says. ‘I knew you’d need it again one day.’
Back in the familiar flat, she misses Xan with terrible pangs. I must do something, Lottie thinks. He can’t stay sunk in despair, and neither can she. The energy of London fizzes in her veins like a sugar rush.
‘I’ve got to make a plan for Xan.’
Justin says, ‘If you nag him, you’ll only make it worse.’
They have met for coffee in Camden Town; the ease of this is a little intoxicating, because all she had to do to get there was catch the 24 bus. Even in six months, London and Londoners have altered: shoes have become more pointed, orange has become fashionable, and all kinds of films she’s never heard of are being advertised on buses.
‘But what can I do?’
‘Darling, you are a wonderful mother, but he can’t be a Mummy’s boy for ever. He has to live his own life and make his own choices.’
Her cousin is Xan’s godfather, and especially dear to her and she to him. They had befriended each other as teenagers, when Lottie had pretended to be her cousin’s ‘beard’. Justin’s wedding will be in the summer, and she is determined to come up for it.
‘Do you think I’m mad for insisting on fidelity?’ she asks. ‘No. It’s an ideal state, but like all ideals, hard to achieve.’
‘Not for me.’
‘Maybe you’ve never been tempted.’
‘I’m too fastidious, I think.’
‘I think ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,’ says Justin.
It’s wonderful to be having conversations like these, not least because Lottie can remember that, very recently, she had been in so much pain that the noise of London had been indistinguishable from the grinding roar of misery and self-hatred in her head. Yet she is not as happy as she thought she would be. Not only is it difficult to sleep again, but she is shocked by the way those two nights of sharing a bed have disturbed her. Despite everything she knows and hates about him, he is still attractive to her even if she, clearly, is not to him.
Perhaps we can find a long-term modus vivendi, she thinks; after all, Quentin adores their children. They could still have long, interesting conversations. They could, in a broken sort of way, be friends. But then some memory strikes her like a shard of broken trust, and the pain and fury throb again. She hates this feeling, but it’s a kind of addiction, because hatred makes her feel alive.
When she goes for a walk on Hampstead Heath with Hemani, it’s also less enjoyable than she hoped. It’s so full of people, unlike Dartmoor. Her friend is tired, having come through her own family celebrations of both Diwali and Christmas.
‘Do you think you’re going to be able to come back to London?’
‘I don’t know. The Devon place is not ideal, but—’
‘I remember when we rented somewhere in Cornwall one summer. It rained every day.’
Lottie sighs. ‘I just wish I weren’t stuck there with Quentin.’
‘So will you divorce him?’ Hemani asks, abruptly.
Lottie can remember urging her friend to leave her own husband, many years ago. He was one of those apparently civilised men who believed he was justified in not only controlling but hitting his wife. When she saw the bruises – always made in places which wouldn’t normally be exposed, so the idea that he couldn’t control his anger was self-evidently untrue – Lottie had been appalled. It was very difficult for her friend to take such a step. But Hemani had only been twenty-seven at the time, and young enough to meet someone else.
‘It’s complicated,’ she says at last. ‘There’s still the money issue.’
Hemani snorts. ‘You can and will find a buyer for your house. Never forget the money! But otherwise, why delay? Do you think he will ever change?’
‘I’m not sure. He doesn’t understand that other people are real, I think. Though he does love the girls, and he does love his mother. So maybe it’s just me.’
‘No!’ Hemani says fiercely. ‘Men who have behaved badly always want to put the blame onto their wives. They think it’s our fault for not being young any more.’
‘You’re right about Quentin not wanting to admit he’s at fault. Sometimes I almost feel sorry for him. I mean, if he’d had a one-night stand or a coup de foudre for someone else, I’d have gone mad with jealousy, but sort of understood. As it is, I just feel part of a sordid midlife crisis.’
‘You can’t let him treat you like this, that’s what you said to me.’
‘Quentin thinks we can carry on
as we were.’
‘But what do you want? Why do his opinions matter at all?’
‘I don’t know. You’re right, they shouldn’t. He actually said to me at one point that he wanted to feel the cage door could be left open for him to fly in and out. I told him I didn’t see marriage as a cage. I thought we’d be mated for life, like those swans.’
Hemani says, watching the pair gliding across the waters of the Hampstead Ponds below, ‘A biologist once told me that their fidelity is due to a diet of weed; they just don’t have the energy to go off with other swans. Nut-eaters, on the other hand, are enthusiastic adulterers.’
‘If I had the energy for adultery, I’m not sure I’d bother. I’d learn Italian or something instead.’
‘So there’s nobody else?’
‘What’s the point? All sex does is mess you up. I just feel an idiot for ever having been taken in by him.’
It’s good to unburden herself to an old friend, but when Lottie returns from her walk she finds herself bursting into tears the moment she enters her mother’s house.
‘Sorry. Sorry.’
‘What has upset you?’
‘I just don’t know what to do any more. Everything is so difficult.’
Marta looks at her with sympathy, but also sternness.
‘My darling, you aren’t homeless, or hungry. You are living in a charmingly rustic part of the world. Your children are at a good school. You are not ill. So why do you cry?’
‘I know, I do know. It’s just that …’ Lottie says the one thing she knows her mother will grasp. ‘Xan is working in a pie factory.’
‘Has he reapplied?’
‘I’m not even sure he can see the point of further education, now.’ A silence stretches out between them: the great unmentionable fear of middle-class life, that a person can be downwardly mobile, rather than upwardly, is in both their minds. She adds, ‘I don’t feel safe in the house, either. It was bad enough having the bailiffs in London, but now I sleep with a poker by my bed. The previous tenant was murdered.’
Marta raises an eyebrow. ‘Unpleasant. Who?’
‘Oh, some poor man called Oliver Randall. It’s his piano you played on – why, what’s the matter?’
Marta says, ‘I knew him.’ Lottie stares, her tears drying. ‘He was a pupil of mine, many years before I retired. I often wondered what became of him.’
Lottie asks, ‘Why?’
‘He was a most talented musician – a composer as well as a pianist – but he disappeared. How did he come to be in Shipcott?’
‘I know nothing about him, beyond his renting from Gore Tore.’
To Lottie’s surprise, her mother nods.
‘He, also, was a pupil of mine. From a much earlier vintage.’
Lottie laughs incredulously. ‘But Tore’s a rock star!’
‘All the good ones are classically trained at the Royal Academy or the Guildhall,’ Marta says haughtily, ‘though few are as generous as Elton John. You know, even the Beatles were choirboys? They would never admit it, because they wished to seem of the people, but their inner ear was trained by the baroque.’
This is so unexpected that Lottie doesn’t know how to absorb it.
‘How strange, Mutti, that we should have rented that particular house, though.’
‘It has a Bösendorfer – of course you would take it.’
Lottie tries hard not to laugh. ‘We took it because the rent was so low, not because of the piano.’
‘Similar people are drawn to the same houses. Mention my name to Gordon.’
‘Oh, his wife and I are quite friendly already.’
‘I thought you said you had found no friends there?’
‘Well, I do have a couple, sort of. It’s just … There’s a gulf between being able to choose friends, as you can in London, and having them chosen by circumstance.’
It’s hard to leave her mother, but when she and the girls board the train at Paddington for the return journey she’s surprised at how keenly she enjoys the landscape rolling past. Lustrous in the low winter sun, the white chalk horse on the hill, the spinneys speckled with starlings, a man walking down a leafless lane all seem like Eric Ravilious paintings. She doesn’t know whether she looks forward to being back at Home Farm or not. In the weeks before Christmas, the valley had echoed to the sounds of deep male moaning which terrified her so much that the first time she heard it she had run out to Quentin and said,
‘Someone’s in dreadful trouble outside, can you hear?’
He listened, then said,
‘It’s just deer.’
‘Surely not! It’s a man’s voice calling for help.’
‘It’s male, yes,’ he said, supercilious as always. ‘Just not human; and what it’s after is sex.’
Still she was unconvinced. They were being haunted by something, and one night she was so convinced that she sprang out of bed and ripped back the curtains. Nothing; and then, just as she was about to curse her nerves, something did move.
Around the gable end of the house stepped a large animal, a stag with its improbably wide, tall crown of branching antlers held high. She had never seen such a creature, and its size and magnificence astonished her. No wonder she could hear the noise of hoofs, given the weight of what it carried … To grow those each year, just to get a mate, must be so exhausting, she thought.
They have found a table seat, and the girls are colouring in pictures with brand-new felt-tips from Marta. She has been generous to them all, buying her granddaughters new shoes and warm, pretty dresses from Gap. She has even taken Lottie to the Clinique counter at Selfridges.
‘Darling, do not turn into one of those middle-aged women who never wear make-up! It is so terribly depressing for everybody to see. Nature is not on our side, and nobody admires those over thirty who believe a naked face is better. You need this.’
‘I’m past caring, Mutti.’
‘Believe me, you are a spring chicken. Do these things, not for your husband, but for yourself.’
It’s doubtful Quentin will even notice. But her mother is right: a little make-up does help her feel less colourless and depressed.
‘Lottie?’
She looks up, and there, of all people, is Martin, with whom long ago she once shared the house in Spitalfields. He looms over her, grinning and holding a paper bag from the café.
‘What are you doing here?’
He has changed, she notes. The red-gold beard is now neatly trimmed, and his jacket is fashionable. He looks like a better-groomed William Morris, confident and contented.
‘I live in the country now.’
‘Let me guess,’ exclaims Lottie mischievously. ‘Hobbit holes?’
‘Not exactly, but almost, yes.’
Martin blushes. She remembers that Di Tore had mentioned him as her architect for restoring Shipcott Manor. No wonder he looks prosperous.
‘So – you’re busy?’
‘Yes. People are still building, despite everything.’
His eyes look at her with enquiry. Lottie says in a rush of frankness,
‘I’ve been jobless for a year. It’s dire.’
‘Bad luck.’ Martin pauses. ‘And Quentin?’
‘Well—’ She grimaces and indicates her daughters with her eyes. ‘You?’
‘We divorced seven years ago.’ He grins. ‘I set up a practice in Devon and things are OK. Better than OK, really.’
How strange it is that Beardy Martin, as Quentin calls him, has become a success, while she, working for one of the big firms, should not be.
‘Lucky you. We’re renting a place near Trelorn and trying to sell our home in London.’
‘Trelorn? That’s very close to me. Look – why don’t you bring your portfolio over?’ Martin says. ‘I might be able to put some work your way.’
‘Really? That’s very kind.’
Especially, she thinks, after how my pig of a husband behaved to you. He gives her his card – another sign of how much he’s chang
ed, Lottie thinks – and she sends him her mobile number and email. The ping as it arrives makes them both laugh.
‘See you,’ Martin says, and lurches off.
It’s as if the life she has left behind, with its web of connections, has not abandoned her after all. She stares after him. He knows who he is now, she thinks, and it suits him. Memory prompts her to another thought: there had been a time when he had knelt before her, like a Victorian suitor, in an unspoken plea, and she had as silently discouraged him. But in those days, Lottie thinks, I was in my twenties, and I could, as Hemani said, have had almost anyone if only I’d known it.
The train goes through one long tunnel, then another, and emerges to run alongside waterlogged meadows. Here, too, there are swans. As Lottie watches, two begin to beat their wings with gigantic, ponderous slowness, their large webbed feet almost waddling across the water until, in a rush that lifts them, improbably, up and up into the thickening air, with long necks outstretched they fly together into the sunset.
17
Anything is Better Than Nothing
For week after week of the New Year, the wind, cold and mud and rain seem relentless. The only time Quentin feels a normal temperature is when he has a bath, but then getting dressed and undressed in a bathroom without radiators is an ordeal all by itself. He remembers some grande dame he once met who said, when descanting on the joys of rural life, ‘In the country, you know, one need only change one’s knickers every week.’ No wonder, he thinks.
He splits logs every day, wheeling in barrowloads to feed the wood-burner, but even when he gets this burning strongly, he feels listless and weak. It takes some time to realise that this sensation is not entirely physical. The confidence that once drove him on is flickering and fading just when he needs it most. No matter how hard he tries, he simply can’t believe in himself any more. Again and again he wills the landline or his mobile to ring with a call from a commissioning editor, but it won’t.
Even the robin that keeps him company when digging seems to have decided he isn’t worth bothering with. Doggedly, he heaves dead leaves onto the compost bin at the end of the garden, mixing it with ashes from the wood-burner, vegetable peelings, shredded newspaper and anything that will rot down. He is, he admits to himself, slightly obsessed by composting these days – another cliché of country life.
