The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  ‘I don’t want a divorce,’ Quentin says, eventually.

  Lottie almost cries. ‘Stop it, Quentin. You can only make it worse.’

  ‘My mother forgave my father, you know. I don’t want to make his mistakes.’

  ‘No, you’ve made enough of your own. I can’t trust you. Without trust a marriage is nothing.’

  He still doesn’t understand, she thinks, and hardens her heart.

  That one night with him has reminded her what it was to be desired, but she can’t forget and so can’t forgive.

  Everyone has a face or series of faces they present to the world, more or less successfully, but lovers know the face of the essential self – that soft, naked being with all its flaws and virtues which, after childhood, is hardly ever shown to others. Constructing this outer self takes energy and effort, and so, too, does removing it. What Quentin has done to her was not only a comment on her physical charms; it was a criticism of that inner person, made at a time when she was already wounded.

  ‘I slept with you out of pity,’ Lottie says, coldly.

  She knows this hurts him. Quentin’s face closes; from then on he is as reserved and polite as she is. The pain is something Lottie clenches to herself, unwilling to admit its existence.

  Occasionally he does talk, but almost as if to himself.

  ‘It’s true what the nurse said. Something was in the room, and left it.’

  Lottie wonders whether her husband is on the verge of a breakdown. He cries easily, but she refuses to try to comfort him again. It’s not just a matter of rejecting him; if she puts her arms around him, they will end up in bed again, and then all her preparations for autonomy will have to begin again. The fact that she would like nothing better is an irrelevance.

  Mostly, he’s with Naomi or organising the funeral, calling the obituary editors of all the newspapers.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Oh yes. Fa was particularly attached to the TLS as what he called “the last bastion of serious literature, also invaluable for lining the cat tray”. It drove him mad that I wouldn’t publish poetry in the Rambler. He believed I refused to do so to spite him.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Lottie looks at him, and shrugs. ‘I’m not surprised he haunts you, then.’

  When the obituaries come out, some that week and some later, they are surprisingly long and fulsome, describing Hugh Bredin as an outstanding nature poet, in the line of Wordsworth, Clare and Hardy. The prize he won in his youth is cited, and his poetry collection for children. His years as a teacher are alluded to; The Telegraph makes a sly mention of how his ‘Byronic good looks were much admired by many at the progressive school, Knotshead’, but passes over the scandals. Flattering comparisons are made between Bredin, Larkin and Hughes.

  Hugh’s passing is noted by Radio 4, the TLS and an increasing number of letters of condolence both from former pupils and other poets, including the current Poet Laureate. It has become clear that the modest ceremony planned for him won’t do. A full Church of England service is assembled and Hugh will be buried in Trelorn rather than his local parish. Lottie has heard all this at second or third hand, but when she goes in to work she’s aware that people look at her differently.

  ‘He wasn’t my favourite person,’ she tells her mother during one of their weekly telephone calls. ‘Seeing it all published like that, though, I’m quite sorry I didn’t get to know him better.’

  Marta says, ‘That is always the tragedy of it. The old are so much more interesting than the young realise.’

  ‘Xan did. He says Hugh was the best teacher he never had.’

  ‘My grandson is an unusual young man.’

  There is the funeral, which takes up a good deal more time than anticipated. Quentin and Naomi organise much of it, though Lottie cleans the cottage as best she can. She’s fond of Naomi, who will always be her daughters’ grandmother, and this at least can be her own contribution, for The Hovel, too, is going on the market. It’s a higgledy-piggledy place, smelling so much of woodsmoke and old dog that it’s hard to see its charm. Martin has told her to take the week off. She moves the sagging sofas back against the walls, clears tables and brings her own Dyson.

  ‘My dear, it hasn’t looked like this since we first moved in,’ remarks Naomi two days later.

  She seems much as she always does, though less tired. Lottie is surprised and touched to learn that her motherin-law has put down a deposit off-plan on one of the first houses in the development at Trelorn. Quentin knew this but, typically, hadn’t thought to tell her. His hostility to everything to do with the project would be depressing if it weren’t so obviously caused by envy – or is it jealousy?

  Does he believe she’s sleeping with Martin? The idea is so absurd that she almost tells him she isn’t. Some instinct, pride perhaps, warns her not to. Let him believe what he does, it will make their final parting easier.

  There is to be a wake at the cottage after the funeral, and her girls have a happy afternoon baking brownies for the event. Quentin’s son Ian joins them. He greets Lottie with a mixture of cheerfulness and sympathy. They’ve had very little to do with each other, but she can see that he is both very nice and good at what he does, in that unmistakable way of people who have found their path in life. Later, she comes into The Hovel’s tiny kitchen and finds Quentin and Ian making canapés. On another occasion it might have struck her as comical to see two large, heterosexual men fussing over miniature sausage rolls.

  ‘All they needed was to find something in common,’ Naomi murmurs to Lottie. ‘You know Quentin is about to become a grandfather?’

  ‘No. That’s going to put the finishing touch to his midlife crisis, isn’t it?’

  ‘He seems quite excited, actually.’

  Xan has told her about Marta’s astonishing revelation concerning his own father. He has every right to be angry; so does she. Why did her mother think she had the right to conceal such information all these years?

  ‘Do you think it was racism?’

  ‘One thing I’m sure of is that my mother hasn’t got a racist bone in her body. I went to pieces when I found I was pregnant, and she was probably just being protective. Don’t hate her for it.’

  ‘I don’t, but I … I don’t quite know what to do. What if I find my father and he’s awful?’

  ‘You don’t have to make any choices right now. It comforts me that he did try to get in touch.’

  ‘Though he didn’t try again. It’s not enough to try just once.’

  ‘But think how difficult it must have been, not knowing that I never got his message or his name. We were both hardly older than you are now. It’s too easy to condemn others.’

  The day of the funeral is fine, and the church in Trelorn is packed with people. They are mostly elderly, one or two quite famous. The smell of mothballs displaces that of bats.

  ‘Much as poets hate each other, they stick together,’ Quentin says, with a flash of his old self. ‘Besides, they never turn down a free drink.’

  Xan has chosen to wear his vintage Grateful Dead T-shirt. He sees her raise an eyebrow.

  ‘Yeah, well, the skull beneath the skin, Mum.’

  He plays the church piano, and the pieces – ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’, Pachelbel’s Canon – are beautifully rendered if, like the hymns Naomi has chosen, conventional.

  Rosie tugs at her hand.

  ‘Grandpa said he’d become compost, Mummy.’

  Lottie squeezes her hand.

  ‘Well, so he will.’

  ‘But won’t that be nasty?’

  ‘No, darling. He’ll become compost, and then flowers. You know how Grandpa loved flowers.’

  Rosie’s face clears.

  The coffin Hugh’s body lies in before the altar is not wood but wicker, a kind of pale oblong basket with a lid that Lottie recognises as having been used for some time in the living room of her in-laws�
� cottage as a coffee table. Its unexpected humility makes her eyes fill with tears, as does its smallness.

  The vicar gives an admirable (and admirably short) speech about him, and then it’s time for Quentin and Ian, as Naomi will not speak. Ian’s speech is brisk, dry and sensible, talking about how he had come to know his English grandfather, and how much he had enjoyed getting to know him. Quentin’s is much less expected.

  ‘My father was many things – a husband, a father, a teacher,’ he says. ‘But most of all he was a poet. He spent his life writing poems, most of which he didn’t consider good enough to keep let alone publish. Despite a couple of them being famous, he considered himself a failure.

  ‘His life here was one deep source of solace, alongside my mother’s love and support. This is one of his favourite poems, which he asked to be read aloud at his funeral.’

  Quentin’s voice wavered for a moment.

  THE loppèd tree in time may grow again,

  Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;

  The sorest wight may find release of pain,

  The driest soil suck in some moist’ning shower;

  Times go by turns and chances change by course,

  From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.

  The sea of Fortune doth not ever flow,

  She draws her favours to the lowest ebb;

  Her tides hath equal times to come and go,

  Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web;

  No joy so great but runneth to an end,

  No hap so hard but may in fine amend.

  Not always fall of leaf nor ever spring,

  No endless night yet not eternal day;

  The saddest birds a season find to sing,

  The roughest storm a calm may soon allay:

  Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all,

  That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.

  A chance may win that by mischance was lost;

  The net that holds no great, takes little fish;

  In some things all, in all things none are crossed,

  Few all they need, but none have all they wish;

  Unmeddled joys here to no man befall:

  Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.

  The service over, the hymns sung, they file out to more music, and the coffin is carried out to be lowered into the deep hole in the turf. One after another, they throw clods of earth onto it, smothering the flowers as the flowers smothered the coffin, and the coffin the body. It was over: so why does Lottie find herself repeating the words, Who least hath some; who most, hath never all – as if, improbably, they had been meant for herself?

  32

  Grief, or Relief?

  There’s a change of air, not so much a breeze as a chink in the atmosphere. He looks up, and glimpses his father’s scowling face in the window.

  ‘Piss off,’ Quentin says, and a second later realises it’s his own reflection.

  All through the summer, he keeps seeing old men who look like Hugh. It’s astounding how many of them there are. He’ll be driving down a country lane, and a figure in a baggy tweed jacket and corduroys will be stomping along – not his father as he had been in the final year, but Hugh as he used to be, vigorous and fulminant – only the car is going too fast to stop, and when Quentin looks in the rear mirror to check, he has vanished into a mist of midges, or changed to a crooked tree. In busy crowds and shopping centres, he hurries impulsively after a man with Hugh’s set of shoulders and old checked shirt; the shock when a stranger turns round is like a second bereavement.

  If I could only speak to him one more time, Quentin thinks.

  ‘Talk to him, even if you think he can’t hear you,’ Anne had urged while Hugh was dying, but resentment lay on Quentin’s tongue like a stone.

  ‘Fa, I want—’ he began; then stopped. What did he want to say? That all was forgiven, when he couldn’t forget? How could he?

  ‘You weren’t good for his confidence, you know,’ Naomi said at one point.

  ‘His confidence? Since when were children supposed to boost parents, instead of the other way about?’ Quentin demanded.

  ‘You did rub his nose in it, rather. Being in the swim of things.’

  ‘Yet he was the one who chose to bury the family down here.’

  ‘What kind of education do you think you’d have had otherwise?’

  ‘But Knotshead was a terrible school!’ Quentin said, appalled. ‘Terrible. You can’t really mean you thought you were giving us an advantage?’

  ‘Yes, we were. It was a famous public school; it had its drawbacks, like many – but it also had some good teaching, and it offered us jobs and you an education. It was what we could afford. We tried to do the best we could for you.’

  ‘Well, you did at least.’

  ‘So did Fa, in his own way.’

  Every hour he’s shaken by emotions. Is this grief or relief? It’s not as if he wants his father back alive. Hugh’s talent was a deformity of personality for which the Bredin family had all suffered. Widowed, Naomi looks as if ten years have been smoothed from her face. She has her own friends, and now that Hugh has gone they appear, like timid woodland creatures, with food and flowers and friendliness. Naomi has always been loved. With one drink inside him, Hugh was charming; with the inevitable second his mood would turn and by the third he became a monster. It had been like living with a bomb that might go off at any moment. No wonder people kept away.

  ‘Why do you stay with him?’ Quentin had asked his mother, in his twenties. ‘Why not leave?’

  ‘He makes me laugh,’ she said.

  This always puzzled him the most. If she remained with his father because they had great sex, or she needed the money, or social status, or wanted to keep the family together, he could understand it – but to waste your life for laughter? Like many born with the gift of wit, Quentin is mystified by the emphasis the opposite sex place on humour, presumably as an antidote to disappointment. Sometimes, it’s true, he has a flash of memory: his parents sitting together with tears of mirth running down their cheeks. What was the joke that was so funny it had been worth all the insults and ignominies his father had heaped on them all? His sister, younger and more vulnerable, had been so wounded she had fled to the other side of the world, disowning all of them. How could jokes be worth so much?

  Yet often he himself has thought that he must tell Lottie about some ridiculous thing that has happened to him – only to remember that of course, he can’t. That easy communication had been severed the moment she knew he had been unfaithful. To laugh with somebody is to be with them, contra mundum, and since that day he, not the world, has been the enemy. He can eat with her, live with her, even sleep with her, but the shaft of sunlight in which the happily married spend their lives no longer shines on them.

  He has, it seems, fallen back in love with his wife. The fact of this dismays him. Is he really someone who can only want what he can’t have?

  Quentin gazes out of the window. How little this landscape makes him feel, and how transient. The lopped tree in time will spring again … The hedgerows here are hundreds of years old, thick woven walls of living leaves: hazel, ash, holly, hawthorn, beech, field maple, service, blackthorn and elder, the forgotten foot soldiers of England’s fields. Once laid by skilful coppicing they are now cut back to bristling branches through which the wind whines in winter. Yet there are elms here which have escaped the ravages of the rest of the country, shooting up long after the breed is believed extinct. Only they will never grow into the trees they were supposed to have been.

  Maybe I will have to accept the Shed of Doom, he thinks. If it’s in London.

  His daughters are playing in the garden. Rosie calls out in her queenly manner,

  ‘Daddy, I’m a unicorn, and my name is Horny.’

  He suppresses a smile.

  ‘You might want to call yourself something else,’ he suggests. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like, um, Moonshine?�
��

  Stella neighs agreement, stamping her foot, and both girls gallop off. He watches, wondering how much of this he will miss.

  Again, he hears Lottie saying in that meeting in the kitchen almost a year ago: We could at least have had each other; and his own response, One must be thankful for small mercies. What a pig I was, he thinks.

  She’s back from London with Xan once again, having gone up to see her cousin Justin’s wedding. They hadn’t invited him, needless to say. It had been an enormous party, and by Lottie’s account, both glamorous and enjoyable.

  ‘I suppose it’s only gays who can afford to get married these days, because they don’t have children,’ he remarked.

  ‘I hate to break this to you, but quite a few do have kids, too. They’re just like anyone else.’

  All his life people have been decrying marriage as ‘just a piece of paper’, but it isn’t the paper, it’s the words on it, those terrible and beautiful promises to bind you to another person, they are as much spell as promise. His love for Lottie now seems to him to have never gone away but to have sunk into a kind of subterranean river, lost to sense and buried beneath guilt, only to erupt again like a fountain forced through a fissure.

  Yet Quentin needs his capacity to hate, for it’s almost the only thing that still gives him any energy. The service and singing, the former friends and colleagues coming to pay their last respects, the platitudes overlying the desolation of what will come to them all.

  He will never see his father again, never speak to him, hear him, hold him or hate him. Nothing is normal, and at times he glimpses the moment when Hugh lofted him high above a crowd onto his broad shoulders, or raced beside his frenetic attempts to balance on a bicycle, or picked him up from the last train as a student instead of leaving him to hitchhike home in the dark. The man who shouted, swaggered, bullied and denied has receded; and the man who had strewn books his way, who had fed his intelligence, and who could quote Churchill’s wartime speeches, remained. Hugh had taught Quentin to strike a fire, build a den, fly a kite, track a deer, avoid self-pity, throw a punch and always know where the sun set and rose. In this version, his father was a good man. He thinks of how Hugh’s breathing had stopped, then started, then stopped, over and over for hours, until there was no breath left at all.