by Amanda Craig
‘My parents wouldn’t agree. You know my father’s dying?’
‘Sorry. You never get over your parents’ death, mate. Not that it’s a pissing contest.’
Quentin has found an unlikely ally in Gore Tore. The friendliness that had grown when he thought Tore was a tramp has continued; Tore thinks it a great joke, like Quentin never having smoked a joint.
‘I could never see the point of drugs,’ Quentin said.
‘Oh, drugs are great. Of course they are. They’re just not worth what they do to you. You take them because you’re curious, or you’re bored, and then you’re not curious or bored, you’re only interested in drugs.’
‘What got you off them?’
‘Music.’
The ease with which they’d talked in the pub continues. Is he like this with everyone? Quentin is not so naive as to believe that he is Tore’s new best friend. There’s more than twenty years between them in age, and Tore can’t lack for either entertainment or companionship.
Yet there is a kind of loneliness about him. Half his old friends, he’s said, are dead. The other half are always touring.
‘It’s the only way. The music business is fucked by the Internet, just like your lot,’ Tore said, with the grin that has no mirth in it. ‘At least us dinosaurs still sell CDs. My fans haven’t learnt how to stream music, or if they have they don’t like it.’
Tore has a whole barn full of vinyl and CDs, and also, to Quentin’s surprise, books. He reads a vast amount, some of it predictably crazy stuff but some of it serious.
‘My father would never believe you’ve bought all his poetry.’
‘I think I remember your dad,’ Tore said. ‘Gave my son a bollocking, when he was at school.’
‘That sounds like my father, yes.’
‘Right old sod.’
‘Definitely him, then.’
Tore laughed. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for your mum, though.’
‘So have I,’ Quentin said.
‘Maybe that’s what you and I have most in common,’ Tore remarked. ‘Our dads were shits, and our mums were saints.’
Naomi remembers Tore, too.
‘He was the oddest pupil at Knotshead. So bright, but he hated everything apart from music and writing songs. He was better going straight to the Royal Academy. Fa loathed him, but then he loathed a lot of people.’
‘Why didn’t you leave Fa?’ Quentin asks. ‘He’s just so difficult.’
Naomi says, ‘You know, in my generation you didn’t divorce when things weren’t perfect. Of course I was unhappy, for a time. However, it wasn’t all the time, and there have been wonderful times as well. Only the two people concerned know what really goes on in a marriage. We both understood what we’d be losing – not just the love and shared memories, but all the friendships and experiences we had together.’
‘Did you forgive him?’
‘What mattered to me was you and your sister, and my work, and the life we made.’
‘But he’s never apologised.’
‘I didn’t feel he had to.’
Had his mother been duped as well as cheated? Is she a fool? He can’t tell. If she feels rage, it’s buried too deep beneath a naturally cheerful disposition of a kind that Lottie doesn’t have.
I’ve ruined everything, he thinks; but I can still try not to become like my father.
29
The Wind in the Grass
Lottie is easier in her mind about leaving her mother, now that Xan is staying with Marta for a few weeks. It’ll do both of them good. Even if she herself can’t sleep there, London is his home as Devon can never be. She doesn’t want him to live in a place where he will forever feel alien.
Still, she’ll be back soon for her cousin’s wedding to Sebastian. The party will be at Leighton House, which with its lavish Oriental décor seems entirely appropriate.
‘Don’t tell me there are going to be two Bridezillas?’
‘No, of course not,’ Justin answered, nettled. ‘Just say you’ll be there. You’ll be my only blood relation.’
Lottie promised, though London is no longer a place she can tolerate. For Xan, of course, it is paradise regained. He’s out and about again, no longer dependent on cycling (though he says he’ll keep doing that as a student, to save money), and catching up with his mates.
‘I wish I could spend the rest of the summer here,’ he says.
‘You can’t, though. Oma will need her home back.’
But the main point is that he will be going to university. He will have to take out a student loan in order to obtain the education that she and Quentin once had for free; but he is once more on the right path – stimulated, encouraged, befriended, tested, and out of a place which isn’t right for him.
Stella and Rosie won’t have that kind of pressure, she suspects. Maybe her children will be disadvantaged as a result, or maybe they won’t be. Driving back to Devon, Lottie thinks about the prep school which her daughters had been at previously, where the minimum spend for birthday presents was £30. She had been so wound up trying to make sure her children jumped through all the right hoops that she’d forgotten to ensure they enjoy childhood.
Martin has behaved with scrupulous propriety since his rejection. He isn’t the kind of man who’d repeat an overture without encouragement, although strictly speaking it could count as sexual harassment. In practical terms, he’d be far better for her than her husband: her mother is right in thinking she should have married him, for Martin is kind, good, talented and honourable. They share a deep interest in their profession, even if they approach it differently, and she likes him. But even had she wished to, she’d known the instant he kissed her that he was wrong, on a purely animal level.
She can’t return to her previous state, and she can’t fool herself into thinking Quentin can ever be trusted. She has to become a new person in order to survive, someone who isn’t afraid of being alone, perhaps for ever, and someone who is in control of her life.
There had been a time, right at the beginning, when she thought that she might be able to stand it. They could have an open marriage, as some people did, and eventually his libido would burn out with age and the family could be preserved. It worked for some people, by all accounts, and it’s clearly what her husband would have preferred.
‘You’ll regret it if you divorce me,’ he said, in the beginning. ‘You’ll die lonely if you divorce me.’
At that, she had come to her senses.
‘Nothing is lonelier than a bad marriage,’ Lottie answered. ‘You don’t seem to understand: I will never, ever be taken for granted, not by you or anyone.’
‘So your pride means you’ll destroy everything.’
‘It’s not my pride: and you’re the destructive one.’
Lottie is back to churning the same arguments round and round, as if turning a liquid to a solid.
‘He won’t even take the cat to be spayed,’ she mutters to herself. McSquirter reminds her of Quentin, so maybe it’s not surprising. She’s taken care of the females, naturally; it’s been difficult enough finding homes for one litter of kittens, but the strict division of labour should mean that her husband sees to the tom.
The green of the trees makes her eyes dazzle. She can feel the way life is almost at the crest of its delight in its own existence, and although it must pass, nowhere seems lovelier than England in this time.
Or maybe my brain has rotted away, Lottie thinks. That’s what Quentin would say. The swell of Dartmoor, with its bluebells stalking out of the turf, the rushing streams, the vast clouds, the deep lanes, the skylarks – all these are nothing special to him because he’d grown up with it.
Still, the summer has made it easier to get along, and as she is now earning twice what he does, he is notably more polite. Again and again, her thoughts return to money. She had never cared about it in the past, but it has come to mean a great deal. It’s the weapon each holds over the other, and even if she, as the mother of two yo
ung children, is bound to get the bigger share, whatever she is awarded will not be enough.
There is some progress, however, in that they have come to an unspoken agreement in which Quentin cooks, which he is good at, and she washes up, which means it’s done properly.
‘I’ve always hated cooking,’ she admits. ‘It’s nothing but drudgery to me.’
‘Whereas I love it.’
There is a flat grassy area just outside the kitchen which, shadowed by the ash tree at noon, makes a perfect place to have meals. In the warm, dry evenings they grill sausages, chicken or fish over a rough barbecue of bricks, and get mildly drunk. They haven’t holidayed together for years, but this feels like it. Stella and Rosie are in ecstasy, running around as dusk falls, pausing barely long enough for their suppers before zooming off again, shrieking like swifts as they dart through the garden. Often, they have new acquaintances over, including the Viners. Anne turns out to be not only the GP’s wife but the nurse who had cared for Quentin’s father, which Quentin at first finds slightly awkward.
‘Anne is lovely. You know, she has five children?’
‘How on earth do they manage that and work?’
‘She gives each one a day of the week to him or herself, and the weekends to them all. But that’s what they both wanted, and they make it work, especially now the eldest two can babysit. They’re the kind of family that you’d never find in London now.’
‘So? Civilisation is driven by people being in cities. Remember what Cecil Rhodes said, that if you’re English, you have won first prize in the lottery of life? Well, it’s even more true if you’re a Londoner.’
‘Yes. Thank heavens I’m out of it. I felt like a frog being boiled alive.’
They have both been round to Shipcott Manor, especially now the sale of the London house and the purchase of Home Farm have been agreed. Knowing that it’s going to be her actual, permanent home instead of a rental has made her see all kinds of exciting possibilities for it.
‘Look at the invisible man walking across the field, Mummy,’ Rosie says.
‘It’s just the wind in the grass, darling.’
‘Is it?’
Lottie opens her eyes, sees the long stalks parting and closing.
‘Yes.’
She watches the grass swaying this way and that. It’s an optical illusion, just that.
‘It looks like the sea,’ Stella remarks. ‘Why don’t we go to the seaside, Daddy?’
‘I’ve never even seen the sea,’ Rosie says.
Quentin and Lottie exchange glances, then glance away in mutual embarrassment. In happier times, such as their honeymoon, they had spent many days on the Amalfi coast.
‘Let me look up the tide times.’
They are in luck, for the tide will be out in the late afternoon, when there’ll be fewer people. Suddenly, they are all piling into the car with old towels and costumes.
‘Won’t it be freezing?’
‘Not by now,’ Quentin says. ‘You two can hire wetsuits if you like.’
‘I’ve never swum in the Atlantic,’ Lottie says.
‘Really? Well, you’ll be in for a surprise then.’
They cross over the Tamar into Cornwall, and the landscape changes into flat, heathery fields which seem to stretch on and on, when not interrupted by giant white windmills whose blades turn smartly in the afternoon light. Then, when least expected, she can see a dip, and a patch that turns from denim to damask. A long straggle of beige bungalows fronted by hydrangeas, and then the thin tarmac plunges down past banks of wild flowers, and down again, past a caravan site and a couple of B&Bs. The road becomes stonier. At the very bottom, where boulders are heaped about like discarded toys, is the beach. There are gulls bouncing on currents of air, and rock pools, and the broad wavering watermark of streams which, having plunged over the cliffs, now meander to the sea.
The beach, a vast crescent of sand, is the most glorious imaginable, and beyond it the sea glitters. The smell of salt, the taste of it, is everywhere. The tide is right out, and her daughters rush ahead, bodyboards flying behind like sails, into the sequinned dazzle.
It’s so different from the Mediterranean: a bubbling cold and effortless power which is wholly alive. The glassy heave soaks half her torso, then sends a suppressed roar. Lottie laughs, a little nervously, but the girls catch wave after wave, shrieking with delight as their bodyboards swoosh them towards the shore. She catches one too, with little difficulty.
‘Oh, lovely, lovely!’ she cries, shocked out of reticence by surprise.
They romp about in the waves together, laughing like lunatics. She wishes she could be like this more often; it’s not her choice to be a martyr, as Quentin believes. Stella and Rosie are fearless, and the more they show how well they can swim, the more she relaxes.
Quentin can surf properly; she can see him longing to join the tribe that stands apart, waiting for the big swell which turns swimmers into gods standing on water. Yet he doesn’t; he has chosen to prostrate himself on a humble bodyboard like theirs. She is surprised, and a little touched by this.
‘Your turn, I’ll keep an eye on them,’ he calls.
Lottie nods and swims further out to where bigger waves are breaking.
It’s rare to see him these days, for he’s spending more and more time with his parents. It can’t be long now. Lottie tries not to think about Hugh’s death, chiefly because she doesn’t want to think about her own mother not being there, but also because it’s easier to see Quentin as a person without any redeeming qualities. The small acts of thoughtfulness and even kindness that he’s been making of late are, she reminds herself, those of a practised deceiver. Maybe he’ll be better as an ex-husband than as a husband: that’s all she can hope for.
Waiting, she bounces, and with each bounce it’s as if she is getting lighter. The fine sand puffs between her bare toes, and the sun has made a broad band of gold to follow. Out here, the turquoise and pale green have darkened to slabs of cobalt, cross-hatched by the wind. The water flexes beneath her board, making it thrum the length of her body, and then it catches, rises up in a long thrust which fizzes and boils on and on in a rush of momentum until, panting and laughing, with the taste of salt on her lips, and the beat and roar of her own blood in her ears, she is returned to shore.
It reminds her of something, but she can’t think what.
30
The Silence of the Lambs
Sally dreads high summer. All the bustle of life, and then slaughter.
Up and down the billowing hills, the hedgerows ever bigger and shaggier. She sees the hawks quivering on the heated air, the trees bowed down by the weight of their own leaves, the evenings glowing until eleven at night. The ground chirrs with tiny green crickets, and the whirl of harvesters spins the meadows into bristling blonde blocks of new hay. When the moon rolls up the star-pricked sky, the fields are striped with silver.
Even when clouds shed thunderous water, turning roads into swift brown rivers, the rain is warm, and the heated earth releases its pent-up scents. Then the mists rise and bleach everything to the sepia tones of an old photograph, and the hills vanish in a veil of cloud. The weighing, the dipping, the dosing, the dagging and tagging are over, and the lambs are chunky adolescents. It is time.
Peter and Jip do it like carding wool, steadily and carefully separating the ewes from their young, rounding up the flock as so often before and guiding the lambs through a series of pens. Stepping fearlessly onto the ramp of the hay-lined trailer, their felted wool bulking their bodies, the lambs seem almost to be enjoying each other’s company. In they go, and now that the ewes can’t see their lambs, their calls become more plaintive, their long bony faces dismayed. The calls become more and more noisy. Do the ewes remember what has happened before? Sally knows that animals have memories, and how could a living creature forget a loss like this? They can still smell each other, and the lambs’ noses poke through the pens, their nostrils working.
‘Mehh,’ th
ey say to the ewes, and the ewes answer,
‘Meeehh.’
‘Mheh.’
‘Meh-meh.’
The trailer will be driven to Trelorn – and how lucky they are, that they don’t have to be driven for hours up the motorway, increasingly stressed and thirsty like so many, and why don’t opponents of fox-hunting protest about that? – and then guided to the place of concrete and steel. Here the lambs will be unloaded down a ramp and through more pens until, beneath a fluorescent light, each lamb eventually stands alone. It is a very clean place, hosed down and swept in accordance with strict hygiene rules, but of course the lamb can smell the blood, a scent all herbivores are exquisitely alert to. It won’t walk forward, so the slaughter man will carry it into the room, kicking, and pin it to the concrete floor with a knee.
Even then, the lamb struggles, until the man retrieves a pair of electric prongs from a bucket. These are put on either side of its head, conveying an electric current which stuns it into collapse, so that, with its heart still beating and its legs twitching, it has its throat cut. It must be alive when this happens, because all meat must be halal so that Muslims will buy it, even if most Britons would rather it didn’t have this additional bit of suffering. Blood sprays everywhere, dyeing the lamb’s head and forelegs crimson, and its eyes glaze. A minute later, it is hoisted by its hind legs onto a hook, and its woolly hide is pulled off, like a jumper over a child’s head. The red carcass dangling down is wholly anonymous, and ready. The belly is swiftly sliced and the hot entrails removed. Finally, the carcass is inspected, approved, stamped. Life has been rendered into meat. It is calm, efficient, relentless.
The first time Sally had seen slaughter, she felt sick and faint. It was shocking to think that the roast joints they enjoyed on Sundays had come from creatures she and her sisters had sometimes bottle-fed. That they had devoted so much care and thought to an animal’s welfare not for its own sake, but so that it would produce better food for human consumption. Later, she had come to accept it as part of the cycle of life and death. When she’d trained in London, she’d come across vegetarians who had no idea that the cheese they ate could only come from cows whose calves had been taken away and slaughtered; she’d despised them for their ignorance. Yet few people love their animals as farmers do. They never name them, never look them in the eyes, and yet they have cared for them, and when the time comes to send them to be slaughtered, there are few that do it without sadness. This, too, was something townies could never understand.
