The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  London is still steeped in pain. Flecks of her past flick through her memory as she hurries down Haverstock Hill. Here is the Chinese restaurant where she has sat with a handful of perfectly pleasant men whose embraces she neither sought nor desired, and here is the crêpe stall where she’d hung out with other girls after school, pretending to be cool. Here is the plump scarlet postbox where she’d posted off so many applications in pre-computer days. Down there is the road to the Heath where she’d walked with Xan as a boy. Here is where there used to be a hardware shop, now in its latest reincarnation as a bookshop. There is the road where a boy she’d been hopelessly in love with lived, and here is the enormous Methodist chapel at the top of Pond Street which, after decades of decrepitude, is like so many churches in North London being converted into domestic accommodation. The hospital looms over it all. It’s where she’d been born, and had given birth to each of her children; where, in fact, she’d expected to die. Only now she isn’t so sure.

  This city, so enormous, so familiar, so endlessly self-renewing, no longer feels like home. It looks the same, but in the way of a building whose façade has been retained while the building behind has been gutted. It’s like her marriage, not real any more. Of course, Hampstead Village has been going this way for a long time, only Lottie has been so used to seeing her mother’s neighbours that she hadn’t noticed when the Jewish faces faded away, along with the people who couldn’t afford designer clothes or new cars. But now the whole city is becoming like this, sterilised by money. When did it become necessary to look like a model, or to sprawl on the pavement in yet another café sipping a mochaccino? The enormous cars, the latest iPhones, the banks of flowers flown in from Africa, the sheen of superiority that encases London like an impenetrable bubble – what connection did these have with the cosiness and shabbiness, the high ideals and low heels of her youth?

  As ever, the hospital is crowded, as if all those whom age, poverty and infirmity had rendered incapable of surviving the metropolis have been flung through its doors to be patched up or discarded. Lottie shoves £20 into her son’s hand and says,

  ‘Get yourself something to eat, and some fruit and The Times for Oma. I’ll text you the ward number, OK?’

  When she is given directions, it’s to the top of the hospital, not the humbler lower levels. Not for the first time, Lottie feels mildly exasperated by the way her mother has always gone on about how terribly poor she is, while being, effectively, a multimillionaire. Don’t go there, she thinks. After all, her own predicament is due to a national crisis and a bad marriage; Marta deserves whatever money she has saved, and her wealth is like so many Londoners’, wrapped up in having bought a house. If she has health insurance, good luck to her. That she and Quentin can no longer afford it, any more than they can afford private education, is something that she has to accept.

  Standing in the shiny steel cubicle, she can feel London crackling through her like electricity, addictive and alarming at the same time. Why is it impossible to be in this city for more than an hour without feeling the invisible worms of stress writhing and crawling under her scalp all over again? For a moment, the relentless, soaring sensation is accompanied by the urge to scream; but then the lift slows, and comes to a halt.

  The heavy ward doors give way to a calm cleanliness tinged with the aroma of freshly cooked food.

  ‘Sole meunière, with a goat’s cheese tartlet and apple crumble to follow,’ her mother says, with satisfaction. ‘It’s better than a hotel, and look at the view.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Darling, I am in mint condition.’

  On the contrary, Marta is shockingly different in a hospital gown and without make-up. Even her white hair appears to have fallen, like whipped cream which has collapsed. She looks not only old but elderly. Lottie takes her hand.

  ‘Are you in pain, Mutti?’

  ‘I have pills.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  Marta sighs. ‘Heidi tripped me up as I was coming downstairs.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, she’s nearly done that to me, too.’

  Lottie thinks to herself that Heidi is almost a different species to dogs like Bluebell and Baggage. How long will it take for Marta’s leg to mend? Weeks and weeks, no doubt, and there are bound to be complications, given her age, and the need for physiotherapy. Xan enters with grapes, a newspaper and an awkward look.

  ‘Oma?’

  ‘Dearest boy,’ she says, brightening. ‘Come and give me a kiss. Ach, you haven’t shaved.’

  ‘I’m here to stop you getting too comfortable.’

  Lottie can’t help feeling proud of her son, whose wide grin and coppery curls are like an infusion of energy and life in the room.

  ‘What can we do to help?’ she says.

  ‘My neighbour has Heidi, but it’s not a satisfactory situation as she has cats, and they will keep running away. If you could bring her home and take the poor doggie for walks …’

  ‘Yes, fine. What else? I’ll set up a regular Ocado delivery, if you give me your credit card.’

  Marta has always resisted this; though impressively good at the Internet, she doesn’t trust online shopping. She says, unexpectedly,

  ‘Good idea. How long can you stay, darling?’

  Lottie thinks about the difficulties of even parking a car outside her mother’s house. Marta probably has no visitors’ permits, so she will have to order these, or find a meter. So much that is stressful about London life seems to be connected to driving. She looks through the slats of the hospital blind, at the packed postal districts swarming with people and machines. If I stay here, she thinks, I’ll go crackers.

  ‘Not more than a week. I’m in the middle of a project, and I don’t want to leave the girls with Quentin for too long. Maybe you could come to stay again too—’

  ‘No, my darling, the house is not big enough, is it?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ Lottie agrees, relieved. ‘But if you stay in London, you are also going to need someone to be with you when you get out, Marta.’

  ‘I worry most about losing my strength in my arms and hands, you know,’ Marta says, squeezing some kind of putty with one hand while the other twitches with inaudible trills and semiquavers. ‘But I am to have physiotherapy. It will take six weeks, the doctor says.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Xan says. ‘I don’t mind. I can walk the dog and do shopping and stuff.’

  Marta brightens. ‘Are you sure? You do have a job, after all.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not in a fixed contract, you know?’

  So the affair with Katya isn’t serious, Lottie thinks, relieved.

  ‘You are a good, sweet boy, and have made your Oma very happy.’

  She does what she can to make Marta comfortable during the week she stays. In truth, the house in Church Row is in a bad way, cracked, dingy, and despite Marta’s cleaner, dirty.

  ‘It’s not that nice any more, really, is it?’ Xan says, looking at the double drawing room. Even its fine Georgian sash windows on the first floor can’t conceal that everything is faded, discoloured and worn. There’s a big brownish stain on the ceiling where there has clearly been a leak, and the chintz curtains are torn, both in their lining and their fabric. ‘I have such good memories of this place, but it’s all kind of broken down.’

  ‘A house needs love and attention and energy, just like any other relationship,’ Lottie says.

  ‘It’s too big for just her, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know. But this is where she’s been for fifty years. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.’

  All the same, Lottie does make some attempt at sorting through Marta’s cupboards. There are piles and piles of greyish, balding towels which must date back from her parents’ wedding, which, greatly daring, she puts into a recycling bin, and shelves of ancient browning paperbacks whose glue has long since given up, stacked two-deep in the bookshelves which, after judicious inspection, she dumps as paper. A cupboard yields up four vacuum cle
aners, none of which function, a defunct fridge and an electric kettle which, when plugged in, promptly blows a fuse.

  ‘She has this mania about never throwing anything away, even if it’s no longer useful.’

  ‘She can’t have looked at any of these for years. They have so much dust on them.’

  ‘Careful! I don’t want the dust bringing on an asthma attack.’

  ‘Stop worrying, Mum. I’ll be fine.’

  Of course, she thinks: you don’t feel under scrutiny here. In London, being black or mixed-race is completely normal, like voting Labour. It’s the one thing she really dislikes about country life.

  He helps pile the car high with rubbish to take to the recycling centre.

  ‘D’you think Oma might be getting dementia?’

  ‘Not a bit of it.’

  No, the real problem is that her mother is living in a large house that she simply can’t afford to keep going … Only Marta will never leave Hampstead. She looks for smaller period properties nearby. There’s a tiny terraced cottage, fully modernised, up on sale for a mere £2.5 million. Imagine, Lottie thinks, how much easier Marta’s life would be with £1 million to spend on herself, and a home which is actually warm and comfortable … It’s the kind of daydream which can only lead to resentment on one side and regret on the other.

  ‘She won’t move until it’s too late,’ Justin tells her. ‘It’s the same with my mother. They hang on and on and then downsize to a single room in a nursing home.’

  Lottie has visited her own house, to check on some minor repairs that the tenants requested. It’s strange to realise that she no longer feels the strong emotions she had once had for it. She’d put energy into her home that she had not, really, put into her marriage.

  In fact, her former home has been the scene of so much unhappiness that she is really profoundly relieved to be getting rid of it.

  ‘We just love it here,’ the Canadian lawyers say.

  ‘I’m so pleased,’ Lottie answers. She doesn’t mind the ghastly retro tins they have put into the kitchen, or the tasteless prints. The deep taproot of feelings she’d once had about this property has been hacked off, even if those for Quentin still make her wince. (But if she’s patient, these too will die, she tells herself.) She can see its faults and its advantages, and maybe if they moved back in she would stop noticing the ugly tower block opposite, and the incessant noise.

  Quentin is being more annoying than ever about the sale.

  ‘What if only half the house were sold? It’s going to go on rising in value.’

  ‘No, and I don’t care. It’s over £1.2 million, and that’s enough. We’ll each get £450,000. And Quentin, with my half I’m going to buy Home Farm.’

  The silence between them builds and disperses, like clouds outside pushed this way and that in the unresting winds. He doesn’t need to say how much he hates the idea. It’s painful having this kind of consciousness of another person, even if you no longer care what they feel. Thank God he doesn’t know about the murder, she thinks: he’d make that into a reason for not continuing there.

  ‘You have to come back.’

  Lottie clenched her fists. It almost sounded as if he is missing her, but she knows it’s just the inconvenience.

  ‘I don’t like being away from the girls, or work. Xan is staying behind for a bit.’

  ‘It’s grim at my parents’, you’ve no idea.’

  He floods her with his own misery just because she happens to be the person who is around, like a mirror. It’s so typically selfish. She thinks how different Martin had been when she’d rung to apologise about having to cancel the client meeting.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lottie, I can cover the Trelorn build this week, though I’d like to have you back. You’ve had so many good new ideas. Everyone is impressed. I’m so sorry about your mother. It must be dreadful for both of you.’

  The generosity of this touched her.

  ‘My mother has broken her leg. It’s bad, but not life-threatening.’

  There was a pause, then he said,

  ‘But you’re back at the end of the week, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You aren’t thinking of moving back, then?’

  ‘I’d miss Devon,’ she said. ‘I even miss the rain.’

  ‘I know, me too.’

  The trouble is that these conversations are freighted with too much, after what had happened.

  One evening, just before she received the call about her mother’s accident, she and Martin had been working later than usual in the Portakabin office. It was dark, wet and windy, and the feeling of being in a warm, dry place was particularly comforting, especially as Martin, like herself, enjoyed having Radio 3 on in the background while working. The pools of light from their computers and work lamps made the outside world disappear.

  They were drawing the next stage of the development, the one on which Lottie would have far more influence. It was, as always, demanding. This stage included the community building, and at present Martin’s designs looked ominously like those for King Theoden’s hall in The Lord of the Rings. He wanted it to be built entirely out of oak, whereas she could see how steel could play an important part, particularly now its price was falling.

  ‘I do love the Arts and Crafts principles,’ he said.

  ‘So do I, but we can still use modern techniques,’ she answered. It’s the first disagreement they’ve had, but each is too sensitive to the other to clash. Instead, they slowly worked through the possibilities. Quentin accuses architects of being egoists, insensitive to anything but their own vision, but it isn’t like that, she thinks. You have to believe in your ideas, but nobody can get far without a mixture of resilience and adaptability. Martin, like herself, has the hunger for a really good project, and to get it passed they’ll bury any differences without rancour.

  This is, she thinks now, partly the product of maturity. It’s like any profession: in the beginning, nobody is your friend, it’s feast or famine, and you have to be ruthless in the pursuit of commissions. Everyone seems to be a rival: it is only later that you realise how stupid and base this was. Hardly anyone, in any art or craft, cares about it as another artist or craftswoman does, and therefore it follows that you have far more in common with those who make and create than you do with everyone else. These days, all she cares about is that an architect, rather than a computer, is involved in any design. They each know they will not be famous, or rich, and this is not the dream. The dream of the true architect is to build, just as it is for painters to paint and writers to write and actors to act, and the enemies are those who want nothing to happen, to change.

  ‘I always thought you were the one who’d win prizes,’ he’d told her. ‘Like Zaha Hadid.’

  ‘So did I, but look where I wound up – having my entries for competitions ripped off by the Chinese, and suffocating in someone else’s big machine,’ Lottie answered. ‘You’ve done far more.’

  Of course it was disappointing not to get that kind of recognition, but plenty of architects won prizes for buildings that were hated by those who had to use them, and that was surely worse. The Trelorn project won’t draw attention to itself with flashy innovations or unusual shapes; it will merely be useful and graceful, sound and well made. It will make sense. It might even be loved.

  Lottie was making the card and paper models for it. This was crucial because it gave the council and the public a proper idea of what the development would look like, and she was better at it than Martin.

  ‘We are going to keep the trees on the site, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, the oaks and beech. Not the ash. I was thinking of suggesting native cherry for the street planting.’

  ‘Do you know, until a couple of months ago I had no idea what the difference was between any tree?’

  ‘Shocking. That’s what comes of growing up in a city.’

  Eventually, it was time to stop. They both stretched, rubbing t
heir eyes and switching off most of the lights when somehow, Lottie was never quite sure how, she found herself being energetically kissed by Martin. It was not an agreeable experience, but she was too startled to know what to do as his tongue, surrounded by what felt like wiry fur, probed her teeth. A car swept round the bend and they were caught in its headlights. She sprang away, trying not to wipe her mouth.

  Martin, almost as shocked as she, apologised in a stammering voice.

  ‘I’m so sorry – so sorry, Lottie. I don’t know what came over me.’

  She knew perfectly well what it was, but also knew that if she made it any more embarrassing than it was already she could no longer work with him. He had felt her recoil: he was a sensitive man and a kind one, who had acted on a moment’s impulse and half a lifetime of attraction. She couldn’t be angry, so she said,

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’m just – I can’t cope with anything else, you see.’

  She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but neither could she let him think it could be repeated. It was, in any case, true.

  Though to be scrupulously honest, it did give her a small degree of satisfaction to know that at least one man still found her attractive.

  25

  A Thousand Years as a Sheep

  Quentin has still not talked to his landlady: frustrating on a number of levels, not least because Di Tore and Lottie have apparently become friends in the blink of an eye. How do women manage it? He has glimpsed Di (and of course Googled her too) on several occasions, but remains outside the charmed circle.

  In any marriage it’s often the case that one partner is preferred over the other, but it’s a shock to Quentin to find himself relegated to second-best. He has always been the sociable one, the person asked to parties – not Lottie. The great benefit of journalism is the access it gives to interesting people; and such is the beguiling nature of fame that he, like many another, had mistaken the smiles and charm of the rich and powerful for genuine relationships. The fact that what they were acknowledging was conditional on his employment is one bitter lesson; but that Lottie should have become in demand after detaching herself from him is another.