The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  It’s such a relief, and yet – he will never not miss him.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you more,’ he says to his mother.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know things are hard.’ Naomi looks weary again. ‘Are you still divorcing?’

  ‘That’s what she wants.’

  ‘It’ll be difficult for her to work full-time without you, of course.’

  ‘I suppose there’s Janet. She helps Di Tore with the boys, doesn’t she?’

  Naomi makes no answer. He knows she dislikes Janet, as his girls do.

  He can hear Janet, or rather the Dyson, downstairs. He’s determined not to listen to these cavils, especially given the filth in his parents’ house – caused in part by Naomi’s refusal to ever have servants, as she calls them.

  The washing machine lets out a banshee wail as it goes into its spin cycle, then stops abruptly. He finishes his piece, and tries to email it. This is always the tricky part, because the broadband signal, like the mobile one, seems to come and go. Impatiently, he watches the symbol rotate at the top of the screen like a miniature Wheel of Fortune, to no avail. The signal, or whatever it is, won’t load.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He goes downstairs, and finds that, as expected, the modem is in the wrong place. This small curved box is the one thing connecting him to civilisation, and it’s never supposed to be touched.

  ‘Janet? Janet! Have you moved this?’

  ‘Oh, yes I did.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, you must not touch it. If you move it, I can’t send emails, and if I can’t send emails I don’t earn any money, and if I don’t earn any money, I can’t pay you.’

  ‘All right, all right, you’re as bad as my Ex, he was always complaining about it, it’s bloody British Telecom—’

  ‘If you move it again when I’m on a deadline, you’re fired.’

  Sweating with stress, Quentin tries again, and a minute later his piece flies off into cyberspace. In London, he’d never stopped to think about it, but here he can see any email in the form of a green bar that either grows from left to right or freezes, like a Star Wars light sabre. Go on, go on, he wills it silently, his stress stretching out and out. He imagines his email battling through all the millions of other texts coursing through the wires at the telephone exchange, perhaps with a light sabre. It’s all utterly mysterious to him, the process by which he is able to earn a living out in the middle of nowhere. His children’s generation take this technology for granted, but he’s old enough to remember when copy had to be typed on a typewriter, and brought into the office, or else dictated. In those days, you actually knew what your colleagues and commissioning editors looked like, instead of talking to a disembodied voice, or merely receiving a text.

  There’s a ping, indicating his column has been received. Quentin sags. Then he revives. He goes through this misery several times a week, but as soon as his piece goes off, he’s free.

  ‘Let’s go to the beach,’ he calls to the girls. ‘The tide is out.’

  Trips to the seaside have become a regular treat. They can’t afford a proper holiday abroad, but the nearby beaches are, he has to admit, far cleaner than those of the Mediterranean, less touristy – and the ice creams are better.

  ‘Is Mummy coming?’

  ‘I don’t know. She might be able to get away early.’

  ‘Shall I wake Xan up?’

  ‘Let him sleep, Stella. He can come with us another time.’

  It’s one of those evenings which coincide again with low tide, and Lottie follows from work in her own car. Ever since they had slept together, he’s been hoping that things might be improving, that she might be thawing towards him. He can’t tell. It’s like seeing her in a wetsuit, she’s somehow both visible and impervious.

  Once again, they ride the waves that are always different and always the same. The wide crescent of pale gold beach is almost empty, and the lifeguards have packed up their flags. Once again, they fling themselves face-first onto the salt water. He has the trick of it, born of his own boyhood on these same beaches, and being able to play with his daughters is a compensation for not being free to surf properly, in lonely glory. Sometimes he catches gentle, playful waves with one daughter, sometimes with both, and sometimes with Lottie, all of them caught up in the same twisted skein. Sometimes he doesn’t catch waves at all, the imperious surge for the shore losing impetus and slumping flat just when it should grow. Yet sometimes, unexpectedly, what looks small and unpromising will magically heave and swell into a great, muscular steed, its neck maned with foam, which gallops gloriously on and on, its body bucking beneath his board until its last exhalation on the sand. These are the best of all.

  Such a wave is carrying him along when he sees an old man standing on the shore. The sun catches his white hair and beard, and in that instant, Quentin staggers through the surf and tries to run, because here is his father, his way of walking, the same pale fawn trousers and old blue shirt.

  ‘Wait! Wait!’

  He throws his bodyboard down on the sand, racing to catch up with Hugh. He’s much further away than he realised, and then not.

  ‘Wait!’

  Hugh turns, and it’s not Hugh, not his father, but some other man, much younger and still strong enough to walk along the sands.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I – I’m so sorry. I thought you were somebody else.’

  The man nods and smiles. Perhaps this kind of thing happens to him often. Quentin walks back to Lottie and the girls, picking up his brightly coloured bodyboard. He feels an idiot.

  Lottie is silhouetted against the sun, her hair slicked back. Apart from the gentle swell of her stomach you would never think she’d had three children.

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘No. I just thought I did.’

  ‘The waves are perfect.’

  ‘There’s hardly any current, you know. I’ll keep an eye on them if you want to surf.’

  She nods, and paddles further out.

  He doesn’t want to think of such matters, turning instead to their daughters. Stella is shooting out, her legs and arms elongating her into a miniature of the young woman she’ll become, and even Rosie is changing from the happy rotundity of infancy. Every week they seem to grow lovelier and more interesting.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, watch me do a somersault in the water.’

  Rosie turns bottoms up, like a duckling, and emerges to get a slap in the face from a wave. She sinks at once, flailing in a trail of frantic bubbles, and he rushes up to haul her, gasping, into the air, colliding with Lottie.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ Rosie wails, but her arms and legs clamp around her mother.

  You’re as bad as my Ex, he hears Janet’s voice say.

  Quentin turns, is slapped by another wave, and there is another ghost of his father walking out of the dazzle. Salt water streams from his nostrils, his head sings, and then the figure says to him,

  ‘Xan.’

  33

  The Only Thing

  Ever since he returned from London, Xan has been itching to leave. The plan is that he, Bron and Chen are going inter-railing round Europe at the start of September. When he searches online for hostels, he can hardly contain his impatience.

  Family life is more dysfunctional than ever. Lottie is always at work, and when she is at home she’s fully preoccupied with catching up on chores and the girls. Xan loves his little sisters but sometimes it’s hard not to resent them. After all, he’s the one who has been away, and he’d have thought that before he leaves for uni she might just try and pay him a bit of proper attention. It’s going to be his last year as a teenager, a strange thought. He wonders whether they’ll even remember his birthday is coming up.

  Meanwhile, Quentin keeps cornering Xan, saying things like,

  ‘The only thing that matters in life, the only thing, is love.’

  He’s like someone who has discovered religion or psychotherapy, a
nd in fact Xan wonders whether some deep-level shit isn’t going off in his stepfather’s head. Annoying though the old Quentin had been, the new one is just as bad, embarrassing himself and everyone else.

  ‘Dud seems pretty cut up.’

  ‘I think Quentin’s only just realised that he loved his father,’ Lottie answers.

  Xan hopes she isn’t setting herself up for another disappointment. Once a selfish dick, always a selfish dick, and he doesn’t trust his stepfather just because he’s lost his own father and is sad about it.

  Lottie sometimes says how sweet he’d been as a child, and it always annoys him. Why doesn’t she value the new Xan? He can’t go back to the past versions of himself, only forwards into the future, like the creature living inside the nautilus shell needing bigger and bigger rooms. It’s both thrilling and frightening to feel this, and also sad because he will be leaving his family. The only person who understands it is Marta.

  However, his grandmother isn’t going to be there for him either. Her fall has made her decide to do two extraordinary things: to sell her house, and to move to Italy.

  ‘I have always loved that country, and my friend Ruth is going there also. We will be two wicked old ladies together.’

  ‘You aren’t wicked, Grandma, you just like stirring people up.’

  ‘Exactly! What is wickedness but that?’

  Marta’s house in Hampstead has sold for so much money (‘Six million, even though it is not in mint condition!’) that she is going to buy a serviced flat in an Edwardian block around the corner as well as a house in Tuscany. From the pictures, it’s not nearly as pretty as Church Row, but it has a lift, three bedrooms and a living room big enough for a grand piano.

  ‘You see, I am upside-downing as well. Eventually, your Mutti will inherit all. But if I give Lottie anything now, your step-papa will get half of that. So, to protect her, I give nothing.’ Marta paused. ‘I hope your own house sale in London is now happening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Xan is surprised by his own lack of feeling. The London house had loomed so large in his imagination as the one place where they’d been a proper family, that he’d expected its loss to be devastating. But those memories have lost potency. He’d gone back just once, while looking after Marta. It was OK, but it was the place where a lot of things had gone badly wrong. Houses really are just shells, he thought, and the spirit that had made this one feel so uniquely theirs has moved on.

  Marta sniffed.

  ‘They need to sort out their lives.’

  This, Xan reflects, is perfectly true. Returning from a night shift, he has encountered Quentin coming out of his mother’s room, having obviously passed the night there. Xan stiffened, stared, and made a sound like a dog growling. Quentin smiled weakly and put up his hands.

  ‘Look … It’s complicated.’

  ‘If you hurt her again, I’ll bash your fucking face in.’

  He was bigger and stronger than his stepfather, now, and they both knew it. She acts as if she doesn’t need a protector, but the truth is that any man behaves differently towards a woman if she has another man in her life to back her up.

  ‘This isn’t about what you want, it’s for Lottie to decide,’ Quentin said.

  Xan didn’t want to upset his mother and sisters, so he went to bed where, as usual, he slept like a log. The next day, however, the others are not around (Quentin having taken the girls off surfing again), and he has tea with Lottie in the dappled shade of the great ash. He wants to warn her that she is almost certainly making a mistake. What makes him hesitate is that she looks better than he’s seen her for ages. He hopes it’s not Quentin who has brought this about.

  ‘We’ll be getting our furniture delivered next week. Just think, proper beds and sofas!’

  ‘Are you serious about staying here, Mum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Xan says, ‘But the country is empty and lonely and dark.’

  ‘Those are all natural things. I’m not afraid of them. Of course I miss my friends there – though Hemani and her husband are coming down soon. You know Daniel’s a professor now? Just think, you might even be taught by him! But I don’t need to live there. I know it’s what you want, Xan, because it’s what you need, but when you are older, London is different. You think you’re being stimulated but it takes things from you. Maybe it is middle age, but I need peace.’

  ‘What about the winter?’

  ‘Thrilling.’

  ‘You’re mad. What about us?’

  ‘You will be here in the holidays if you want to be. The girls are happy. It’s only Quentin who wants to return.’

  ‘And will he?’

  Lottie shrugs. ‘I’m not asking him anything.’

  ‘Will you?’

  Lottie is silent for a moment, then says,

  ‘You know, when I was a child, you couldn’t own a credit card or hire a TV if you were a woman. A decade before you were born, rape in marriage was legal. Most girls I was at school with were not expected to go to university, let alone have careers. A hundred years ago, my father’s grandmother was put in prison for asking for the vote. But I can earn enough to keep us. I love what I do and do what I love. I don’t need him.’

  ‘Let us know what you decide, will you? Just because the girls don’t talk about it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped worrying.’

  Still, what does he know about relationships? When he came back from London, he’d texted Katya. He’d assumed that things could pick up again where they left off – after all, Trelorn is hardly heaving with young people. Yet when he looked round the factory floor at Humbles, Katya wasn’t there. He asked Maddy if she knew where she was.

  ‘Gone off, hasn’t she?’ said Maddy.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You mean, Who? That big bloke, Arek. He’s got a wife and child in Poland, too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Pretty girls like that don’t stick around, Xan.’

  ‘But she’s Catholic.’

  ‘Since when did that stop people? Anyway, she’s set up a Polish bakery in Trelorn, and she’ll make a go of it, there are enough of them here.’

  For the rest of the shift, Xan hardly noticed anything else. It’s not as if he’d been in love with Katya, but it is a shock, like missing a step that you thought was there. Girls, they’re all crazy, that’s something he and his friends have all agreed on for years, but without Katya, the endless flow of pies and the squeaking shriek of the conveyor belt grates even more on his nerves. It has not been difficult to get back into the rota, but when his shift finishes he decides to tell the agency that he doesn’t want any more.

  The next day, cycling through the late afternoon sunlight to the factory, he thinks how strange it is that he will have seen a whole year through in this place. It’s driven him half-mad with tedium and despair, and yet it has also propelled him into a different future. Had I stayed in London, he thinks, I probably wouldn’t have been bored enough to be desperate enough to do something. Though in summer, he has to admit, it is pretty. The one big copper beech halfway along, the square Norman tower of the village church, the field where sheep graze under a solar farm, the long stone walls topped by trees and the gated entrance to Shipcott Manor, the curve of the road plunging down into a wooded valley, and birdsong – he suspects that he might miss these.

  He won’t miss the factory.

  ‘I just want to say goodbye, Maddy. I’m stopping here after today.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ she says.

  ‘Lots of new faces,’ he says. Rod is doing his usual touching-up routine, and nobody stops him. Maddy follows his gaze.

  ‘Sooner or later, one of the immigrants is going to have a fight with him.’

  ‘It’s machines that will do for us all, not immigrants.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Soon as the recession ends, they’ll go for automation.’

  Xan looks at her haggard face, and asks,

  ‘Isn’t there something else you could
do, Maddy?’

  Maddy says, ‘If I could get a regular job, with proper hours and pay and everything, course I would. But where’s the likelihood of that?’

  ‘I know. It sucks.’

  ‘I can fit my shifts around my husband and the kids,’ she says, her expression hardening. ‘It’s really not so bad. It’s clean and dry in a factory, which is more than can be said for most of the work round here.’

  Xan thinks how his own family has felt in the past year. Poverty for them has meant no luxuries, not the terror of being actually homeless and actually hungry. The gulf between his life and Maddy’s has always been there.

  ‘Is it really not possible to find a better job?’

  ‘The good jobs, they always go to people with connections,’ she says. ‘Her mum—’ she jerks her head towards Dawn. ‘We’d all like to hear how she landed on her feet. There are people who’d kill for that job with the Tores, and a cottage too.’

  ‘Maybe Janet will leave.’

  ‘Even if she did, I’d probably not get it. I can clean and cook, but I’ve no qualifications.’

  Dawn shuffles by with her trolley, leaning into it like an old woman. She looks odder than ever, her flesh a kind of waxy yellow and her hair invisible under its cap. It’s hard to tell whether she stares at him out of general vacancy or hostility or something else.

  ‘Hi, Dawn.’

  There’s a long pause. He can see her mouth the words, ‘You went away.’

  ‘I’ve been staying with my gran in London. She broke her leg. Have you been on holiday?’

  ‘No.’

  It’s impossible to have a conversation with her, even without the jiggling shriek of the conveyor belt.

  ‘Do you still play the piano?’

  She gives him her sleepwalker’s stare, and turns away. What’s wrong with her? Xan wonders, as the shift bell rings. When he’s changed out of the overalls and boots (his heart singing at the knowledge that this is the last time he’ll have to wear them) he fishes his mobile out and messages Bron. He probably won’t be up yet, but with medics, you never knew.