The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  He can see her blooming in confidence with each new friendship, and it adds to his despair. He had taken it for granted that she always would be quietly supportive of his own success rather than take centre stage. Yet she has, and he is envious. In London, it had been his friends whom they had mostly seen, as hers tended to be dull and he had made no effort to conceal his boredom. He hadn’t thought twice about this, or how isolating it must have been for her.

  Out here, though, nobody is interested in the latest gossip, or the intricacies of party politics. It’s all small stuff, and so deeply agricultural that the one time he had taken the family to see Far from the Madding Crowd (driving all the way to Okehampton for this belated treat), the reaction to the hero and heroine’s climactic kiss had been muted, but— ‘I do hope he won’t forget about his horse,’ said a large woman in his row, anxiously, to general agreement. There was a sigh of relief when, at the last moment, Gabriel Oak did not.

  People here are so rooted in one place, through generations, that they might as well be trees. They hate London, the EU, politicians, newspapers – effectively, everything he’s interested in.

  Lottie, however, has taken to this dreary place with ghastly enthusiasm. It must be the menopause, he thinks. Nothing else can explain it.

  ‘I like people with a moral compass,’ she says. ‘Don’t you understand? I like it here.’

  ‘It’s all bollocks, Lottie. What you’re seeing isn’t a moral compass, it’s poverty. If you’re rich, morals don’t apply.’

  ‘What a stupid thing to believe! People all over the world have the same ideas about how to live a good life, Quentin. Do you think Tore was happy when he was squandering his millions on drugs and yachts and women? Of course not. It’s only now that he’s learnt to give it away that he’s found some peace.’

  ‘There’s nothing more tiresome than a rock star who has his own charity.’

  ‘How about someone who sits around moaning?’

  Whenever it’s his night to babysit, she’s off: yoga, choir-singing, fund-raising for charity – it never stops. But whom does he see? Apart from the peculiar tramp he occasionally bumps into in the pub, there’s nobody. He has no colleagues, or friends. Everyone in the country is bunkered down, and it’s like a retread of the unforgotten boredom of his teens, only those had been so awful they had powered his ambition to escape. Quentin, once he’s read himself into a stupor over a bottle of wine, goes to bed after watching some newscaster with shoulder pads and bad hair reporting on a small conflagration in a seaside town. It was always a small conflagration, and the reporter would ask people what they thought of it.

  As the stench of dung fills my nostrils, I recall the Chinese proverb, ‘Better one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep,’ Quentin writes, then crosses out the stench of. His column is now only 500 words, which means he spends two days working at it, because whatever editors believe it’s far harder to write a short piece than a long one.

  Finding out more about the murder is all he has to occupy him, but he’s made no progress. The crime remains unsolved. Randall stares back at him from the short Wikipedia entry on screen. The photograph shows a striking face: long, with fine straight brows over very dark, narrow eyes, thick inky locks flowing past his ears, a big nose and sallow skin. He’s smiling, with what looks like real warmth. It’s a face that, above all, looks kind to the point of being simple-minded. Despite the Wikipedia stub listing his handful of credits for TV shows and the Oscar-nominated film, nobody he can trace seems to have known him. Like most men over forty, he had no social media profile. (What an idiot, Quentin thinks to himself: in the modern world, it’s like not having an email address.) Yet Gore Tore must have known him. Despite the gap between their ages, they’d both gone to the Royal College of Music, albeit twenty years apart.

  ‘That has to be the connection,’ Quentin mutters.

  He hasn’t listened to much pop music since Elvis Costello – but he is, increasingly, interested in Gore Tore. How many of his songs had he heard during school discos? Dozens, for Tore had been the archetypal voice of anarchy before, during and after his adolescence, a music that seemed like pure emotion, guaranteed to make people dance with the same uninhibited frenzy that Tore did. Quentin remembers losing all self-consciousness to ‘Let’s Go!’, a perennial favourite which always makes people dance. He is a real musician as well as a star, his riffs and experiments with melody something that induces millions of middle-aged people to tearful nostalgia and even a sense of awe. Tore himself is famous for the way he was able to inflame both men and women with – is it lust or joy or adrenalin? He has the androgynous beauty which, contrary to expectations, lasts, and even now he is striking – plastered in make-up, his hair dyed, his image always morphing into something unexpected. He probably looks quite different without all the trappings.

  He’s also a man of some mystery, like all the greatest rock stars. Tore has never given a print interview, and has only done one on TV – for the defunct Snap, Crackle, Pop! in 1975, viewable on YouTube. Quentin watches this. Though obviously stoned, Tore seems intelligent, witty and articulate, with barely a trace of Devon in his voice. His private life, according to the tabloids, has been a mess. His first marriage produced one son, killed in an accident. Some of his ex-lovers had died from overdoses, others from suicide; he’s been divorced four times. (Quentin feels a wince of sympathy.) Yet he’s paid for the education and maintenance of every child proven to be his, and given away large chunks of his immense fortune to all kinds of causes and charities.

  Against his better judgement, Quentin is intrigued. He thinks of what his agent said about a biography. He loathes the idea of ghosting a book … but it might not be as stupid an idea as he thought. Yet nothing will happen if he doesn’t make it so, and introduce himself to Tore as a neighbour. He needs to make his lie to his agent come true: something he’d been accustomed to doing as a young journalist, but which now fills him with weariness and discomfort.

  Stella tinkles away at the piano next door.

  ‘Is that new?’

  ‘Mummy’s teaching me.’

  ‘Really,’ Quentin says. He’s checking his emails. The broadband is maddeningly slow, and the only way to improve it is to sit right beside the router. ‘Mozart?’

  ‘It’s Bach, Daddy,’ Stella says, with the surprise and sorrow that the musical always display towards the ignorant.

  She plays her short piece.

  ‘Lovely, darling. Reminds me of a cigar advertisement.’

  ‘Dawn’s much better than me.’

  As Janet comes in with the Dyson, Stella slides off the piano stool.

  ‘I can’t think with that noise,’ she says reproachfully.

  ‘Urgh,’ Janet says. ‘Give me a good pop song any day. Classical gives me the willies. Besides, what’s the point? There’s no money in it.’

  Apart from cats, the only thing to interest Janet is money, and she will insist on telling them about some discount at Lidl as if Quentin could give a fig. She seems honest, though, and it’s worth £100 a month to not do his half of the cleaning, even if she will bring her lump of a daughter round.

  Dawn is always slumped somewhere like a white whale. It’s annoying, but Quentin can’t quite bring himself to ask that she be left behind. She looks so miserable, he thinks.

  ‘How do you find the school in Trelorn?’ he asks, trying to make conversation.

  There is a long pause. He wonders whether she’s understood. Then, ‘I don’t go there any more,’ Dawn says.

  Quentin says, ‘But you’re how old? Seventeen? You’d have a much better future if you stayed in education.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Quentin wishes he’d asked more, because the next day he visits Trelorn Secondary School, both to check it out if Lottie insists on staying and to talk to the teachers about Oliver Randall. The school – the usual concrete egg box from the 1970s – is the epitome of all he fears for his daughters
in the state system.

  ‘I’m writing a piece about Oliver Randall,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He taught here until last year.’

  It’s clear from the woman’s blank expression that she has no idea who he means.

  ‘He was a musician,’ he explains, as if speaking to a child. He thinks it best not to mention the murder.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Is he a pop star?’ asks one, brightening.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he on the staff or freelance?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The school mostly has freelance instrument teachers, though that’ll change when we become a music academy.’

  Quentin, exasperated, asks, ‘Who would know what pupils he taught?’

  There is a general clucking over this, and then one says,

  ‘I think one of them was that blonde girl. Pretty little thing. What was she called? Dina? Diana?’

  ‘Dana?’

  ‘Lovely voice. Played the piano too. Dawn.’

  ‘You mean, the girl who lives in the gatehouse of Shipcott Manor?’

  ‘Yes. That’s her.’

  It’s hard to believe it’s the same person, but then maybe they have a different concept of what a pretty girl looks like. If so, he thinks, Di Tore must know more. It’s as good an excuse as any.

  Lottie has left Di’s mobile number on a pad. He invites himself to Shipcott Manor for tea.

  ‘I know my girls get on with your boys, and we’re all missing Lottie,’ he says, shamelessly.

  No sooner has he uttered this lie than he knows it’s the truth. Even if she will irritate him all over again on her return, his wife’s absence is more than an inconvenience. When she’s there, it’s like seeing someone close-up, their smallest blemishes magnified. At a distance, he can remember how before everything went wrong, and over supper, or in the car, in restaurants or on walks, he and Lottie would talk.

  Of course, absence is preferable to all the shouting and weeping that has gone on subsequently. He had put all the feelings of guilt and shame into boxes, and never thought that one day the boxes themselves might start to leak and bulge. Nor had he thought that one day he might be served up a portion of what he had inflicted on her.

  No, that had come a few weeks ago when, returning from his parents’ home, he had seen, suspended in a cube of bright light, the vision of Lottie kissing Martin. It was only a glimpse, but quite unmistakable. The shock had made him go ice-cold.

  Gripping the wheel, he felt quite numb. So, it was as he suspected. She is no better than he. He could deal with that. Then he drove off the road into a ditch.

  It was the surprise that made him react like this, just the surprise. So Quentin kept telling himself. Drenched in sweat that turned instantly sour, he turned off the engine, sat there, shaking, then put his car into reverse, got out of the ditch and drove home very slowly. His mind was working perfectly, but he noted with dismay that his reactions were slower than they should be, as if he were drunk.

  Of course she would find someone else – she’s an attractive woman, and nine years younger than him. Martin may be the best solution to his own dilemma, only he doesn’t feel this at all. What he feels is that he’d like to punch that gingery idiot in the face, but he can’t, because the choices which he has dismissed so airily as insignificant are now lacerating him with their steel claws and iron beaks. He would not have believed how much jealousy could make him suffer, how it has skewered his stomach to his bowels, and turned every night into a fiery pit in which he has no rest. Why should it matter? Surely he has wanted to be free of his wife just as she wants to be free of him?

  But however often he has lied to others, he can’t lie to himself. His quick bright mind can’t outrun the lumbering needs of his body, which moans its miseries to his inner ear. Oh shut up, he tells it, angrily; but it won’t. No wonder Lottie had wept and writhed: this is what he had inflicted on her, and now it appears she has done it back.

  There is no aphrodisiac like that of rejection. Now, memory floods him: her eyes, her lips, her breasts, her hips, the hot wet suck of her flesh to his flesh, and how at times he felt he might die of bliss. It had been like nothing else, and he’d been afraid of being in some way subsumed as if all his own vigour would be lost if he didn’t have a second, secret, life to preserve it. Only it is this second life that has destroyed him.

  Making the girls’ breakfast, he stopped and groaned aloud.

  ‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ Stella asked. She was still nervous; unlike Rosie and like her mother, her default setting was anxiety.

  ‘I’m such a bad man. I’m an awful man.’

  Rosie put her arms around him.

  ‘No you aren’t. You’re the bestest daddy in the world.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said, patting him as if he were a dog who might turn dangerous. ‘We love you, Daddy.’

  They are so sweet; it almost sets his teeth on edge. Once they grow older they too will turn on him, seeing him for what he is. He smiled at them, when what he wanted to do was cry. But wasn’t that the constant condition of parenthood? You’re always pretending to be braver than you are, bolder than you are, brighter and more knowledgeable, and they believe you, until they don’t.

  The sound of a car coming down the drive jerks Quentin into blowing his nose. He hurries out, his tears drying in the heat of embarrassment.

  ‘Hello there! Any parcels for me?’

  It’s Sam, looking less absurd in his long shorts now that the weather is warm.

  ‘Yes, a couple. Buy a lot online do you?’

  ‘Oh no, these are books for review.’

  ‘You must be a great reader,’ Sam says.

  Quentin, embarrassed, says,

  ‘It’s work, actually.’

  Sam makes a move towards his red van, and Quentin adds hurriedly, ‘Did the man who lived here before get many deliveries?’

  Sam stops, scratches his head and says, ‘Not as I recall.’

  ‘Did you ever talk?’

  ‘Not really.’ Sam’s voice makes this a long-drawn-out sound. ‘I just delivered the mail, like, as I do to you. Poor chap.’

  ‘It must have been a bad shock for you,’ Quentin says, with the simulacrum of sympathy that he’d always found effective in interviews.

  ‘I still dream about it sometimes. A body without a head, well, it’s not natural, is it? We’d never have recognised him from the papers, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Sam grimaces.

  ‘He didn’t have all that hair! Randall had a big beard, and not a hair on his head. His own mother wouldn’t have recognised him.’

  ‘He was bald?’

  ‘Oh no. He shaved it off. You could see it growing back from time to time. I’ve wondered, after the murder, you know …’

  ‘What?’

  Sam’s ruddy face flushes deeper red. ‘Well, if he could have been in hiding, maybe.’

  ‘This would be a good place to hide,’ Quentin agrees. ‘But who was he hiding from?’

  ‘Plenty of people minding their own business round here,’ Sam says, pointedly.

  His own mother wouldn’t have recognised him … Quentin has seen how men who lose their hair become unrecognisable, and a beard would indeed add to that. But what if the person he was hiding from wasn’t back in London, but here? Whom had he known, apart from the Tores?

  Well, he thinks: I can ask them.

  Quentin piles the car high with malodorous rubbish which, in Lottie’s absence, he’s forgotten to put out on the verge for collection. The tinkling smash of bottles as he posts them into the giant bins is positively festive, for even a visit to the Trelorn dump is a treat.

  This done, he wanders round the town, trying to think what to bring Di Tore, a person who has everything. He goes into a couple of charity shops, spotlessly clean and infinitely beige. There is simply nothing to buy in this place. No posh bakeries, not even a florist.
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br />   It appals him, the absence of enterprise. On Saturday afternoons, just when most working people most need to shop, businesses all close. It’s the same with cafés and pubs, as if everyone must only want to eat between 12 and 2 or 7 and 10 p.m. Then they complain about the absence of trade. The local estate agent’s window is full of shops for sale or rent which, in any thriving town, would be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, but which instead are soaped blank.

  Quentin steps back, scrutinising an empty off-licence to let. The building is on the corner of the square, with big windows on either side. Probably freezing cold in winter … but how difficult could it be to fill its shelves with home-made macaroons and baguettes? How hard can it be to have an Internet café? Then he looks at the stolid, solid people plodding past, at the pensioners tottering along with sticks. These people will cluster round places offering stodgy cream teas, but never move into the twenty-first century, being stuck in the 1970s. His passing fantasy shrivels.

  ‘If only Devon could have proper high-speed broadband, it’d make a world of difference.’

  ‘Something will turn up, Quent,’ his mother says.

  ‘Ma, nothing ever turns up unless you are in London.’

  ‘So will you be going back?’

  ‘Probably. By the way, I’ve been wondering whether you or Fa ever came across the previous tenant of Home Farm.’

  Naomi’s lined face is inscrutable.

  ‘Once or twice. He seemed a very nice man.’

  ‘Was he nice to anyone in particular?’

  ‘I know he gave lessons to one or two whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.’

  ‘What kind of parent wouldn’t pay?’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. Some hate their kids having the brains or talent they don’t. And no, I’m not going to name names.’