The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  ‘Jip, Jip, there will be new lambs in the spring,’ Sally murmurs to the collie, who for once sticks close beside her, ears drooping, when they go out to inspect the remaining herd.

  Peter is gone for at least a day and a night. The fields, after hours of frantic calling by the ewes, become increasingly silent. There are no lambs left. Sally uses the time to weed her vegetable patch, go through her freezer and clean all the windows from the flecks of flies. Jip and Baggage get their fur trimmed with her electric shears, and frisk about like puppies once it’s off. At five o’clock, Sally scatters grain for the new rescue chickens, has tea, bottles raspberries, folds laundry, matches socks and finds herself thinking, sometimes, how peaceful it is to be alone.

  ‘You’ve earned a break,’ her mum’s voice says in her head. ‘Enjoy it.’

  Lying in the bath, her ears filled with warm water, she feels as weightless as a child in the womb.

  ‘I will not be sad,’ she says aloud. No woman is defined by motherhood; professionally, she is more valuable to her community by not having the responsibilities of children. If she longs for a child it’s because she longs for a different kind of love.

  She thinks about the daughter she will never see, and imagines her at, say, seven – the same age as Lottie’s Rosie or thereabouts. She’d decided long ago that this child would have hair on the blonde side of hazel, like her own, and Peter’s eyes, but the rest is hazy. She’s haunted by this child, who is growing more and more dear to her as the chances of her ever being real diminish. She still has periods, but the hair on her upper lip has started to thicken, a sure sign she’s perimenopausal.

  When she surfaces, she gets a shock. The door, which she closed, is wide open. Has somebody come in when she was underwater?

  ‘Hello?’ she calls nervously. ‘Who is it?’

  Ever since the attack on the horse, she’s felt unusually tense about being on her own. Mad, really, because Jip barks and barks at any intruder. In an old house like hers, plenty of doors refuse to shut properly, swinging open thanks to slight subsidence or slamming shut in a sudden breeze. Over hundreds of years, every timber warps; a building isn’t only home to people but to mice, bats, insects and (unfortunately) rats. She knows every creak and squeak in the place, but nothing should have made the bathroom door open by itself.

  Sally’s arms are suddenly covered in goose pimples. If someone is in her house, she could hardly be more vulnerable, being naked and wet.

  Very quietly, trying not to slosh, she sits up, grasping for a towel. She stands, and then, not looking down, puts her foot out of the bath.

  There’s a yelp, and Sally almost falls over in shock. Baggage has been lying on the bath mat, and is now several feet away, looking at her reproachfully. Every freckle of her speckled muzzle seems to be quivering with anxiety.

  ‘Idiot dog!’ Sally exclaims. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Baggage thumps her tail. It’s her supper time, she reminds Sally. She hadn’t been able to see or smell her; order is restored. Smiling with relief, Sally gets out of the bath, wraps herself in a dressing gown and finds the big bag of kibble.

  ‘All you think about is food and walks. Now, don’t jump up! I have the hens to feed as well, and Bouncer. Even if I do love you most of all.’

  Peter comes home eventually.

  ‘Ah-rah-rah,’ he roars, stumbling up the concrete path to the door, when his truck finally weaves up the track. ‘Ah-rah!’

  Drat, Sally thinks, I hope he doesn’t break my pots again.

  Mostly, the drink makes him less shy. Sometimes, he comes at her like a bear, snuffling and groping. He reeks of drink, and sweat, and not by one flicker of her eye does she show how this repels her. Still, it may be worth a try, even when thank goodness it’s over quickly.

  ‘At least our lambs have the best life,’ he mutters. ‘Better’n – better’n …’

  Peter keeps the ewes for seven years, until their teeth are worn out so they can no longer graze, and then they, too, must go off to the abattoir to be turned into dog food.

  ‘’f I had a hunner …’

  He topples off her and begins snoring. She knows what’s on his mind. If he had a hundred thousand pounds, he could buy a beef herd. That’s where the money is. At least, that’s what farmers are saying this year. But the only real money in land is if it gets planning permission for another housing development: in which case it rises a thousandfold.

  ‘I know, appalling,’ Lottie agreed when Sally mentioned an estate being built in a village closer to Okehampton.

  ‘How can architects design such ugliness?’

  ‘I can’t believe any architect was involved. People love to blame us, but those boxes were probably just done by a developer using computer-aided design. They won’t spend the money.’

  Lottie has shown her some of the Trelorn plans on an iPad. None of these houses will cost over £199,000. They are so well insulated they won’t need central heating, but still look like terraced cottages from a century ago, albeit ones with three bedrooms and two bathrooms cleverly fitted in.

  ‘Are those roofs made of real slate?’

  ‘No, synthetic.’

  ‘It’s actually nice,’ Sally remarked in surprise.

  ‘Oh, you can build anything now. That’s what is so maddening about the awful buildings still being put up. Not enough developers think that ordinary people deserve attractive homes.’

  Sally has never realised before how much thought and planning has to go into a building; it makes her wonder how her ancestors and Pete’s had ever managed to build perfectly sound, attractive farmhouses which had lasted for several hundred years, just by using their eyes and hands and what could be scrabbled out of the ground.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought someone as posh as Martin would have been interested.’

  Lottie laughed.

  ‘Of course! He cares about Trelorn, it’s his town too. And now I do too. We’ve had a really good offer on our house in London.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes. You know the market there has gone crazy?’

  Sally said dryly, ‘We know every Londoner who owns a home is a multimillionaire.’

  ‘But only on paper. It’s meaningless unless you sell up and move out, and if you do you can never, ever come back … My only worry is the winters, year after year.’

  ‘You go abroad in January, if you can afford it.’

  ‘Di Tore swears by Australia.’

  ‘Well, she would do, being from there herself.’

  ‘She is very beautiful, isn’t she? I’m sure Quentin admires her deeply.’

  Lottie’s tone was light, but Sally knows what she’s thinking, because all wives and girlfriends become twitchy around Di.

  ‘Di won’t even notice him, you know.’

  ‘Is she really in love with a man twice her age?’

  ‘I wouldn’t presume to know,’ Sally said, though she did have some ideas about Di’s frequent trips abroad. Who could blame her if she had some private fun? Tore probably did, and as long as the boys didn’t know it wouldn’t harm them.

  Peter’s snores have reached almost ear-shattering levels. Sighing, Sally gets up. It’s hopeless trying to sleep in the same bed when he’s this drunk, no amount of kicking will make him stop.

  She goes to the spare room, at the end of the passage. There’s a nice double there, a brass bedstead, and secretly she’s always preferred it. They’ve put up her nephews and nieces in this room when giving her sisters a break, and otherwise it’s just used for old clothes.

  Despite the warm summer, the bed feels quite chilly. She gets up and rummages in a chest of drawers. She never touches this stuff because half of it contains thick thermals of the kind they no longer use, and half contains papers. The drawer she opens is full of odds and ends, and she’s about to close it when she sees a letter.

  It’s from a clinic in Plymouth. She’d gone to it herself, and she thinks, peering at it in the dim light, that it must
be addressed to her, only it isn’t. It’s for Peter.

  Dear Mr Verity,

  Thank you for coming to see me last month. Further to your tests, I regret to inform you that …

  Sally reads on, unable to believe her eyes. The letter is full of standard phrases, offering counselling, but what it tells her is that she has been lied to by her husband for twelve years.

  31

  Nothing but Living

  In the final days of their marriage, Quentin doesn’t need to be asked to take out the rubbish, clean the bath, or do the laundry. He has actually become civilised, as well as civil. Too late, she thinks. Some other woman can profit from her nagging.

  The halcyon weather continues, with every verge and field a garden. The high-altitude clouds drift from the south-west, like great ships passing to places elsewhere. It might be melancholy to think of, only elsewhere is where she and her children will live, for the foreseeable future.

  The house sale is going through in London, and in a fortnight, Home Farm will be hers.

  ‘We need to discuss what you’re going to do next,’ she told him, briskly.

  ‘But can’t things go on as they are?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They can’t.’ He looks so miserable that she feels sorry for him, and adds, ‘I need to have things settled, you see.’

  ‘Are you going to push the button?’

  She doesn’t answer. Of course she is. The moment the money comes into their joint account, she will be getting the quickest, cheapest divorce she can. No matter how sad he looks, or how miserable she feels, she can’t risk backtracking. He’ll only betray her again, and humiliate her again.

  It’s true that he doesn’t seem to be going up to London. From this she surmises that his most recent affair is over, and he has his tail between his legs for as long as his father is dying – but as soon as he perks up, he’ll be off again. She has his measure now. She can survive on her own; one day she might meet another man, but it’s not as if she really needs one. There is sex, but the less people have of it the less they want, and because she can’t sleep with people without love it seems unlikely she’ll have another partner.

  Lottie gets through two loads of laundry and settles down to pod peas, enjoying their sweet taste, the warm summer breeze and a Mozart symphony on the radio. It is a day meant for nothing but living.

  There is no word from Quentin, who has been away since yesterday at his parents’. In the old days, when she waited for him to return, he would send her a text. OMW! What it meant was that he’d finished shagging whatever woman he was with at the time, and wanted her to prepare a meal. Well, that fool is gone.

  She eats supper with the girls and puts them through their bath and bedtime, reading them the story of ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself’. Her daughters love the story, delighted by the Cat’s independence, cheek and cunning.

  ‘He’s so clever to trick the Woman, isn’t he, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, he is. Though it’s a good bargain they make, don’t you think?’

  ‘Are you sure we can’t have a cat of our own?’

  The kittens in the barn are growing up, and Rosie has repeatedly tried to smuggle one they call Smudge into their room, despite its mewling protests. She can’t believe it doesn’t love her with passionate devotion.

  ‘Remember, Smudge will grow up to be like its dad,’ Lottie told them. The dreadful McSquirter is next on her list of problems to tackle at Home Farm.

  The sun sets. A last bumblebee, heavy with pollen, buzzes its way out of a day lily, a blackbird flies shrieking out of a shrub and then even the trees stop rustling. Lottie kisses the girls good-night, and sits out in the garden. Hugh must be dying at last.

  Hadn’t he said how he hated Hugh so much that he couldn’t wait for the old man to die? She’d been shocked when she heard him say this, but his relationship with his father has always been deeply troubled. Nor could she blame her husband for feeling like this. Lottie has never liked her father-in-law, especially not after he’d told her that all architects were obsessed with penises.

  ‘Really?’ Lottie replied. ‘So what do you make of the hospice I’ve been working on, which is one storey?’

  ‘Probably for women,’ he said.

  The only good thing about him, as far as she could tell, was his kindness both to his granddaughters and her son. With children, he became a different person altogether.

  ‘I hate him, I hate him,’ Quentin would say after every visit.

  ‘You don’t have to rise to it,’ Lottie said.

  ‘He’s such a bastard. He takes his failure out on me.’

  ‘But that’s his problem, not yours.’

  ‘No, believe me, it’s mine too.’

  At last, she hears the sound of the car coming down the drive. It can only be him. She braces herself for whatever mood he’s in, but there is no slamming of the door. Her husband gets out of his car, and bursts into tears.

  She has hardly ever seen a man cry, least of all him – though he, of course, has seen her in tears often enough.

  Without stopping to think, she runs over and puts her arms around him. He cries like a little boy, not a man, and all she can feel is pity.

  ‘There, there. There, there,’ she says, pulling him close and rubbing her hand against his back.

  He bows his head on her shoulder, and the tears falling from his eyes soak through. They stand together, and around them, swallows flick into bats.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he keeps saying.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says, hugging him tighter, not knowing or caring what he is apologising for.

  ‘I’ll be OK, just let me have a moment.’

  ‘I know what it’s like to lose a father.’

  She remembers it, the ache of desolation, her seven-year-old self.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s really gone. I kept thinking he would go on, no matter what, even if he drove us all mad,’ Quentin says. ‘It’s stupid, but I did.’

  Hugh had died just before dawn, but the dreary business of obtaining a death certificate from the doctor and calling the undertakers, choosing what clothes to bury Hugh in, and more, had taken all day, he says. They were like sleepwalkers, even as Anne shut down the machines, and left. It was so quiet without them. He had stayed as long as he could with his mother.

  ‘I’ve just put her to bed. All she could do was sit and stare at her knees. I’ll have to go back tomorrow, and the day after that.’

  ‘I’ll do all I can to help.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m so sorry, Lottie.’

  ‘You did the best you could.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry about everything. I’ve been wanting to say it for such a long time.’

  As they stand there they begin to kiss. At first it is the giving and receiving of comfort. They have passed through so many stages of anger, misery and mistrust that it is almost comical when it changes. Several times, she thinks – I should stop this, I could stop this – only she can’t.

  They become like sleepwalkers, and in fact most of the time Lottie has her eyes shut. She doesn’t want to see, because to see is to think.

  How long it lasts she has no idea. At one point she thinks how surprising it is that sex is, after all, so sexual. At another she thinks, Yes, I remember that. Mostly, she doesn’t think. When she opens her eyes, the long summer evening has turned to dawn. Oh God, she thinks. What have I done?

  Quentin slumbers on, a mound of masculine presence. He takes up so much room in the bed, he is hot and noisy and there is a lot of grey in his body hair. And yet, he is that wonderful thing: a man, and a man she can’t help being addicted to. Everything she objects to is attractive. She has every right to be furious, but most of all she is furious with herself.

  ‘This changes nothing,’ she says, when he wakes.

  ‘No. Though I can’t help wanting it again.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not a chance.’

  He hesitates, then
gets up, collects his clothes and leaves.

  Half of her, the half that is rational, is appalled, and the other half is foolishly delighted. She sees every speck of silliness, meanness, dishonesty and vanity in his personality, and yet her stupid animal self still can’t help wanting his.

  They have to talk, eventually.

  ‘I wish I were the person you once thought I was,’ Quentin says.

  ‘Yes, he was too good to be true.’

  ‘I can’t be that person. But trying to be him made me the best I could be.’

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘Yes, for a while.’

  Lottie says, reluctantly, ‘You changed me, too. I never had much confidence with men, before.’

  ‘Yet you are such a strong woman.’

  ‘Strength isn’t the same as confidence.’

  ‘I would give anything to undo what I did to you.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her face shows her scepticism.

  ‘Maybe we can be friends,’ she says.

  ‘We aren’t friends,’ Quentin answers.

  You can trust a friend, love a friend, value everything about them, yet it’s not passion, and certainly not marriage. She knows that as well as he does. When people say of their spouse that they are each other’s best friend, she always shudders, just as she does when parents say it of their children. Friendship is a wonderful thing, but it is voluntary, private and a matter of choice. No flesh and blood is involved. You can walk away from a friendship with hurt feelings but no punishment. Marriage might also be voluntary, and its conversations private, but it is also a public bond in which love and passion are intermixed with property and propriety. Lottie has been publicly humiliated as well as privately devastated.