The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

Di relaxes. ‘Well, there really isn’t anything to tell. We were all upset, Gordon more than anyone. He felt responsible, even if he wasn’t.’

  Lottie wonders whether Gore had ever been given cause to be jealous. Yet if he had, she can’t see why he’d bother to have him murdered. It’s obvious to her that Di hadn’t been in love with their tenant.

  ‘You know, my mother actually taught them both at the Royal Academy?’

  ‘No! How weird.’ Instantly, Di cheers up. ‘So it’s, like, karma you found this place?’

  ‘Yes. But, as she herself said, similar people often seem to end up in the same houses.’

  ‘I’ll tell Gordon. You still haven’t met, have you?’ Di sighs. ‘You will. He comes and goes.’

  ‘Did Oliver have a wife or girlfriend?’

  ‘I never heard of one, no. I don’t think he was gay, either. I think he liked to be alone but was quite lonely.’

  Yes, Lottie thinks, Home Farm had been the house of a lonely man. Yet there had been the doll her daughters found, a make that she knows from her own daughters only came on the market a decade ago, and mail-order catalogues for women’s clothing. It was strange, though there were rational explanations for both: the doll could have been left by a young pupil, and it was all too easy to get junk mail. She’s noticed, wryly, that despite her fall in income, she’s been pursued by the usual catalogues of middle-class life, especially since she has started to shop again, not for herself but for Xan.

  To her immense relief, he has received four new offers.

  ‘I didn’t even know you’d reapplied,’ she said, when he told her the news.

  ‘Dud helped me draft a new Personal Statement at the last moment.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Lottie was not sure how to take this.

  ‘Which do you think you’ll choose?’

  ‘I like Bristol. Or UCL, if they give me an offer. Will we go back to London?’

  ‘It shouldn’t matter to you, because wherever you go you’ll be in a city again. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But whether it is what she herself wants is becoming another question entirely.

  21

  This Animal Life

  Quentin’s father won’t admit he is dying. There is no hair on his head, his skin hangs off his skeleton like a fine fabric, his pain is barely muffled by drugs, and yet Hugh is convinced it is just another illness from which he’ll recover. Maybe everyone has this delusion, Quentin thinks, or maybe his father is being bloody-minded to the last.

  ‘I just want the antibiotics to kick in,’ Hugh keeps saying plaintively.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ Naomi says.

  ‘Then everything will be back to normal.’

  Is it Hugh’s appetite for life, or his deceitfulness, which makes him deny the truth?

  Everyone lives at the centre of their own existence, with other lives circling around them as planets do the sun. How can it be otherwise, without a lifelong effort of will? Yet even to understand that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, that they have their own version of the truth, and their own tender self-regard just like your own, is to make a step away from solipsism. Quentin can’t despise his father without seeing how like him he has become. He loathes this in himself because his life’s work has been to not be like Hugh. He thought he had succeeded, in London. Yet here he is, trapped.

  His mother is very different, and he wonders whether it is because women seem biologically programmed to be more altruistic. Which is rubbish: there are quite as many dreadful women as there are men, and gender is no guarantee of virtue. Naomi is of the generation whose watchword is always, ‘Least said, soonest mended.’ She’ll never complain, or talk about what she suffered with Hugh. However, Quentin has always known that he could pick up the phone to his mother at any time of day or night to ask for help or sympathy, and he’ll get it. Even if she is disappointed in him, she will never stop loving him: but since he can never begin to repay her bounty, there’s no point in trying. Before his marriage, he never remembered to ring her on her birthday, let alone send a card or present, and after it he took it for granted that this would be his wife’s job. Yet he loves Naomi. However much she irritates him, however much he wishes she didn’t accept things with an equanimity which in anyone else would be a mark of stupidity, he will always care about her. If there is any good in him, it comes from her patience and compassion.

  It’s a different matter with his father.

  When he was a child, Hugh had been the great man whose occasional appearances and enthusiasms were treated like natural disasters or bounties. Quentin and his sister were impressed from their earliest days that their play must be quiet and unobtrusive, that meals must be punctual and well-behaved, that holidays were not for their own enjoyment but their father’s. Naomi’s devotion and conviction in her husband’s genius made this seem entirely natural. That had been during Hugh’s heyday, when he had been one of a group of impoverished but increasingly well-known poets of his generation, spoken of in the same breath as Hughes and Larkin. Yet his talent, unlike theirs, had not continued to bear him aloft but had plunged him into poverty and obscurity. They had so little money that Quentin has dim, childish memories of actually being hungry. When the offer of the teaching jobs at Knotshead had come along, Hugh had accepted it. For a poet to teach English at a famous progressive public school was no shame, and given that the deal included free education for his children and subsidised accommodation for his family, it would have been crazy not to.

  Naturally, it was a poisoned chalice. Knotshead was awash with the children of those whose liberal politics sat comfortably with exorbitant school fees, rampant snobbery and sexual misdemeanour. Hugh was admired; though irascible, he taught with knowledge and passion. Unfortunately, the latter tended to be reciprocated by the more impressionable. Though not so foolish as to sleep with his pupils while they were under-age and at school, once they left, it was different.

  ‘They are so pretty, how could any man resist?’ he said.

  Even in the 1970s, that shoddy decade of licentious squalor, it was appalling behaviour. Quentin can’t think back to his adolescence without a great boil of rage swelling inside him. Hugh behaved abominably to his wife, his children, his colleagues and his pupils; and far from feeling shame, had sneered at his children for protesting.

  ‘What does a pair of virgins know?’ he said. ‘Piss off, and mind your own business.’

  You bastard, Quentin thinks. I was a teenage boy, I was trying to defend my mother, I didn’t need crushing.

  Yet Quentin has also spent his life craving his father’s approval. Even now, when he wipes Hugh’s withered arse, a part of him is waiting for praise which never comes.

  His father despises him. Hugh has always seen journalism as the lowest form of writing, and although each time Quentin bought himself a new suit or went on holiday abroad, he mentally thumbed his nose at Hugh, thinking, Fool, this is what I can afford and you can’t, he can never rid himself of the wish that his father would acknowledge his own writings. Did Hugh really think that Dickens, Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh were slumming when they wrote for newspapers and magazines? Poetry kept you poor and obscure and living in a damp cottage with tiny dirty windows; why not admit that journalism demanded inspiration and talent? Yet these days, nobody remembers a word of anything Quentin has ever written, whereas poems of Hugh’s have somehow endured. One, ‘Moss’, even seems to mock him: Yes, the rolling stone gathers no moss but

  Neither is it cast …

  What will replace that looming, baleful sense of presence? Increasingly, he realises that simply by existing, Hugh has shielded him from infinite darkness.

  His father had said to him, in one of their rows,

  ‘I’ll come back to haunt you like Hamlet’s father.’

  ‘If you do, I’ll still tell you to fuck off,’ Quentin shouted.

  The Hovel is the place he dreads going to, yet eve
ry day he steels himself to enter it. Is it out of love for his mother or duty to his father? He doesn’t know. He’s furious with his sister for not coming back from New Zealand to help, but she isn’t there and he is.

  Hugh, his face the colour of batter, is lying where he always seems to lie, eyes half-closed.

  ‘Fa?’

  His father ignores him.

  ‘Bastards, crooks and schemers,’ he says, to The World at One. ‘We’ve had the best of times, and you’re going to have the worst.’

  The thought seems to give him some satisfaction.

  Naomi says, ‘Money isn’t the only thing in life is it? The sun still rises, the birds still sing …’

  Quentin murmurs, ‘I don’t think birdsong is going to be much good to people in Greece, Ma.’

  ‘Don’t bother! She never has the slightest idea about politics.’

  Quentin takes the rubbish out, separating kitchen scraps from the rest. The bins keep being chewed by rats, desperate to get at the rotting food. His mother recycles everything in the belief that just one piece of plastic will end up choking hundreds of seabirds, but if it means a few less gulls, so what? It’s a nauseating job. Unlike Lottie, who swans off to Trelorn every day, he has to squeeze work into the interstices of domestic life. He has, effectively, become a woman.

  He hoses the bins, then straightens up. A clump of narcissus releases its sweet scent in the sun, as if in compensation. For a moment, pleasure fills his senses. To live this animal life might almost be enough. Only, it’s not.

  ‘I’m looking forward to my first crop of tomatoes,’ he says, re-entering.

  ‘I always did think you’d inherit my green fingers, one day.’

  ‘It’s just housework, out of doors.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s the out-of-doors bit that matters.’

  Increasingly, Quentin can’t help wondering whether his wife is sleeping with Beardy. Impossible, surely, but something has changed. Lottie is looking different, or maybe her mouth, and her eyes. He had told her once that she was not unattractive. He was ashamed of it immediately afterwards, because it was a double negative. Now he’s ashamed of his meanness.

  Quentin gets down on his hands and knees to pull up the worst of the weeds, and the act of physical abasement makes him fearful. Right ahead is the stump of an ash tree that his father had cut down decades ago when they first bought The Hovel. Every year, it shoots and suckers before breaking into feathery bronze leaves that are, briefly, beautiful, and it strikes him that whatever existed between himself and Lottie has also been chopped down, suddenly and brutally. Yet feelings, like trees, do not necessarily die; rather, their roots may quicken into not one but many new trees, all growing confusedly in a thicket that must be chopped again and again to keep it under control.

  Money and marriage, he thinks. Who isn’t obsessed by it, especially in middle age when you face both forward and back, seeing all your past mistakes and how, inexorably, they have led to future disasters. If only we were animals, unable to see what is coming.

  ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t get Fa to a hospital?’ Quentin asked. Exhaustion had crumpled and recrumpled Naomi’s face like a piece of blotched paper.

  ‘He wants to be here, at home.’

  ‘Then at least ask for more nursing.’

  Naomi shook her head slightly. ‘Our doctor’s wife is a Marie Curie nurse, and she comes to help with the nights. Anne’s lovely, but she can’t come every day.’

  At times, he goes into the bathroom just to make faces at himself in the mirror. He hates all this, quite violently, and yet he can’t walk away. Is it compassion or a dreadful curiosity, like that which still has him trying to find out why Oliver Randall was killed?

  Not that he’s made any progress there. The people he’s probed just clam up.

  ‘Oh yes, you’re a journalist aren’t you?’ they say. ‘No comment, thank you.’

  Tore is connected to the murder, somehow, he’s quite sure – but Randall was too obscure to matter to anyone. Quentin has checked, and he hadn’t even left a will. Or maybe, like Hugh, he didn’t believe he would ever die.

  Hugh lies on the cane chaise longue all day, when not shuffling off to the toilet, and then water sprays everywhere and Naomi has to come and clean everything up. Even then, he shouts at her.

  Quentin says, not bothering to lower his voice, ‘How can you put up with his vile temper?’

  ‘It’s like vinegar around a pickle,’ Naomi says. ‘It preserves him.’

  All her best efforts to tempt her husband to eat go untasted after the first trembling bite.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, woman!’ he snarls. ‘It only goes in one end and out the other.’

  He hates Hugh, but when Quentin thinks how his own daughters might turn against him in turn, he feels a small cold hand close round his heart. Like Xan, they now call him ‘Dud’.

  ‘You shouldn’t call me that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s funny,’ Stella said, giggling.

  When Quentin had first committed adultery, on the desk of his office, his assistant Mimi had even asked him, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ What had made him answer, ‘Yes’ was an increasing urgency which felt like lust but which was the fear of his own mortality. Even if, like all men, he’d had idle fantasies about doing what he did (not to Mimi specifically, just to any woman he worked with), he hadn’t really intended to go through with it until, suddenly, he was given the opportunity. For all of three minutes, it had felt terrific. But this feeling, he has come to realise, was bought at the expense of his daughters’ childhood. Stella and Rosie will never believe in perfect love. They will hate him, just as he hates Hugh, as a cheat, a liar and a failure.

  To see how you are seen by another person, without love or charity, is almost always unendurable. There was a time when he couldn’t bear not being with Lottie and another when it seemed that the least thing she did was intolerable. Now that she is remote, she has changed again, and he wants her with a griping, costive dog-in-the-manger jealousy, because if she is sleeping with Martin it’s an insult. But how long would that last? If the heart, like the eye, is continually in the process of dilating and contracting, how can any one person be certain about another? Or, for that matter, themselves?

  ‘Lottie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wondered whether you need help with that.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Her voice is not unfriendly, he thinks, rather than friendly.

  Everyone seems to find him superfluous. Quentin’s column is constantly attacked as trivial and pointless by the bloggers who leave poisonous comments on the online version of the Chronicle; he reads them just in case the anonymous person who told him about the murder posts again. Of course what he’s writing is silly: he’s supposed to be entertaining, but rage is the default setting. Why are you being paid for this rubbish? is the general consensus. Every time he files more copy he is aware that he is working in a dying profession.

  ‘Your column has been getting a bit too gloomy, of late,’ Ivo tells him.

  ‘My father is terminally ill with cancer.’

  ‘Bad luck. Maybe you can do a piece for us about it.’

  Ivo doesn’t mean to be heartless; he just thinks like an editor.

  He has such vivid memories of Hugh as a huge, roaring man, overflowing with vitality and aggression: how can all that have ebbed away?

  ‘Oh, you’re here again,’ Hugh says.

  ‘Yes, Fa,’ Quentin answers. He takes his father’s long, thin hand in his own, and holds it, willing it to become warmer. ‘Can I get you another blanket? Or a hot-water bottle?’

  ‘It won’t make much difference.’

  The walls of the cottage are sweating like cheese, but Hugh is always cold. Outside, spring is pouring light over the land, and little green flames run up branches.

  ‘It should be warm enough to go outside soon,’ Quentin says.

  ‘Is it?’ Hugh looks, his eyes cloudy. ‘I can’t see.
’

  Quentin experiences another terrible lurch of understanding. There aren’t going to be months or weeks left, now: just days and maybe hours.

  ‘My feet are cold.’

  ‘Let me massage them.’

  He’s surprised to hear himself offer this, and equally surprised when Hugh grunts an acceptance. Quentin takes off his father’s bedsocks, and is repulsed at the thick, cracked, yellowy nails. They look more like claws than human feet. Very gently, he rubs the skin with Vaseline, and Hugh whimpers.

  ‘Don’t do it like that,’ Naomi exclaims sharply.

  Hugh says, ‘Stop fussing over me, woman.’

  Later, Quentin asks her,

  ‘Why do you put up with him?’

  ‘I don’t want him turning into one of those old men who die alone, like at Shipcott Manor.’

  ‘Did he? Die alone, I mean?’

  ‘Yes. Never married, and after all the wild parties he wound up starving to death in one room in that big house.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid he deserved what he got. His housekeeper, well, she died before him. Worn out, poor woman.’

  ‘And people say Sir Gerald was Tore’s father. Was he?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. Gordon looks the spit of him sometimes. I think that’s partly why he’s married so many times; he didn’t want to be like his father. But his mother was a brave woman. She wouldn’t let him be adopted, which in those days was what women who were pregnant and unmarried were supposed to do, and brought him up in the gatehouse.’

  ‘It’s where our cleaner Janet lives now, you know.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m sure it doesn’t leak now! The Tores have done an amazing job restoring that place, and it’s so good it’s a real home again. A house is nothing without children. You know, Ian and Katie are going to make us great-grandparents?’

  ‘Er, no.’ The news that he will be a grandfather soon is not exactly welcome. ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘Yes. I think they made the journey specially to see Hugh, though they stayed at the White Hart. Ian really is a delightful person, and so is Katie. They’re a lovely couple. I think they’re going to get married, though they haven’t said yet.’