The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  ‘He used me, didn’t he, and then when I had his kid it was all change. He’d do anything for Dawn, just not the woman who’d given her life.’

  ‘Difficult.’

  Janet gives a short laugh.

  ‘You can’t imagine how. There he was, the successful musician, and there I was on benefits. I wouldn’t put him on the birth certificate, just in case, and he wouldn’t give me money. Dawn and me, we came down here to make a new life, but he followed us. I didn’t find out for ages. Thought he’d been clever. Shaved his head, grew a beard, got a job as a music teacher just so he could see my daughter. I never even knew he was there!’

  But Dawn’s father doesn’t sound like a bastard at all. He sounds to Xan like someone who cared a lot for her. More than his own father had done, at least. It all sounds so petty. If only I had my inhaler, Xan thinks. He dreams of its acrid tang on his tongue.

  ‘Why hurt Dawn?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t harmed her half as much as she’s harmed herself. She was the sweetest, prettiest little girl you ever saw, but she turned into a monster. She called me a bitch and a bully – me, who gave her everything – and that I was a pathetic drudge she couldn’t wait to leave behind. And as if that wasn’t all, she and my Rod … She did it deliberately, to hurt me, little cunt.’ Janet pauses.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Oh, he couldn’t help himself. But she was fifteen; she should’ve known better, the slut. She knew what she was doing, and then when it went wrong, she ran to her dad to cry and complain.’

  Xan listens, appalled. So Janet had been jealous of her daughter twice over, Xan thinks. But what had her father done? Where is he now?

  ‘He was all for blaming me, said Rod would go to prison for doing what he’d done. He was going to tell the police, only he came to see me first, and that was his mistake – don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing to that door. You won’t get out, and if you do, don’t think I’ll let you live, either.’

  Xan resumes his sucking at the air through the keyhole. His hands are increasingly cold and useless. He whispers,

  ‘Why not – help her?’

  ‘I was the wicked witch, wasn’t I? She went to her fucking father, and told him all kinds of lies. But then he always did believe her, just because she was so pretty.’

  ‘Not – now,’ Xan says.

  ‘No, I took that away from her.’ Janet’s voice is gloating. ‘I made sure of that. She never thought to thank me for making sure she took her pills every day. I used to have to crush them up, just a quarter of a pill in a teaspoon when she was a baby, and I never forgot, not once. So it was me that made sure she grew up pretty and clever, and me that took it away from her, to teach her a lesson.’

  ‘Stop this.’

  Suddenly, he’s aware that the hole is obstructed. He looks through it, and there is Janet’s green eye, looking at him from the other side. The intensity and hardness of her gaze makes him shiver. How could he and his family have lived with this person coming in and out of their home for almost a year, and not noticed she is raving?

  Stella and Rosie had, he thinks. They called her Maleficent, and had had their fears dismissed as childish. But maybe they hadn’t been blinded by all the adult dramas swirling round his mother, stepfather and himself. To them, Janet had been little more notable than a piece of domestic machinery. They’d taken her on trust as someone reliable and responsible, had been embarrassed because she is English like them, rather than foreign, and never thought that she was a person too, with her own history and issues.

  ‘You’ve no idea what trouble your kind causes,’ she says, and moves away. For a moment, Xan hopes she’s given up, and redoubles his efforts to break the lock, kicking at the door, wrenching the hook into the wood, but then he hears her switch on the vacuum cleaner. Its nozzle obstructs the hole he’s made, and the cat hairs swirl as the suction draws out the air from his prison.

  Immediately, he’s streaming again, gasping and banging on the door, weakly. He can feel his nose and feet and fingers go numb, and he falls into blankness, the roar of the machine turning into the roar of his dying heart.

  36

  Some Chance

  Lottie can’t think why Quentin has rushed off without a word of explanation. Has she said or done something to upset him? (She reminds herself that she is owed a lifetime of offence where he is concerned.) One moment they had been together in a long buoyant glide, and the next he shot out of the sea and was running towards the car park. She stares after him with a familiar sensation of hurt, and suspicion.

  Could it be a forgotten newspaper deadline? It’s unlikely. Maybe he left a pot boiling … The board attached to her wrist tugs like a tired child. There is an obvious answer: another woman. There will always be another woman, and if there isn’t, she will always suspect there is. This is why she cannot allow herself to care about him, ever. She turns back, and is stopped by a cold wave.

  ‘Fuck!’

  The taste of salt water is misery, yet she must swallow it or distress her daughters. If only I could let my rage out, she thinks. If only I could use it, somehow.

  The wind hisses through the dry grasses, all but two of the other surfers have left. Lottie wades out to her daughters. It’s getting cold. The wetsuit, with its property of enabling the water inside it to be heated by her own heart’s blood, is no longer enough, especially not when shivering from sorrow.

  ‘Time to go home, darlings. The tide is coming in.’

  ‘One last wave!’ says Rosie. Stella, though her lips are almost purple, adds her own plea. She can’t bear to disappoint them, not when they’ve had such a happy day.

  ‘Just one, then we must hurry home.’

  Following in their lacy wake, Lottie is overcome by melancholy. They will not remain childish much longer. If only one could hold on to them at this stage, she thinks; while they are so beautiful, and love you, and are happy. Xan had once been like this, and she misses that child more than she can say; though when she sees the V shape of his torso, his legs, and the muscles sliding under his arms, she is also happy. He has become a beautiful young man, strong and healthy and clever and good. She loves them all so much. She is, despite everything, lucky. This is the thing to remember.

  ‘It’s the bestest feeling isn’t it Mummy?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Can’t we stay a bit longer?’

  ‘No, look, the waves are coming all the way up the beach.’

  Only a few days ago they had come without consulting the tide times first, and the contrast had been unnerving. The miles of pale, placid sand were sunk beneath ferocious pummelling brine. All the familiar rocks were invisible except when the muscular water peeled back to show them bristling with black shells. The violence shocked Lottie, but Quentin laughed, no more fearful than a gull.

  ‘This is real sea!’

  He was trying his best to charm, and she wishes he would stop. People who have fallen out of love don’t fall back in again, it’s not a tide. Or is it? She wishes it were possible to excise every emotion for him. As long as she hates, she loves, though she loves her children more.

  Why doesn’t Quentin feel this?

  ‘But I do – I adore them,’ he said when she accused him of caring as little for his daughters as he had for his abandoned son.

  Adoration is not the daily bread of love, however. Lottie could never have rushed off as he did, confident that someone else would be there to pick up the pieces, because without her there is nobody else … She had thought that marriage would make him grow up. Then, when he remained just as impulsive, she thought, yes, but fatherhood will sort that out. Then, when it didn’t, she thought, but age will certainly bring him to maturity.

  No matter what has happened, he remains unreliable in everything but his unreliability. Why had she not understood what that would lead to? For there are men, many men, who are wonderful fathers: she’s seen them, holding their children with tenderness and pride, or simply plodding al
ong, faintly embarrassing and yet putting others first, patient and loyal and always there. The unsung heroes of family life, sticking at jobs that probably bored and humiliated them just to do their duty by the wife and kids. Why had she not married one of them?

  Back up the sands now disappearing beneath the flat frills of advancing surf, stopping to scoop up towels and flip-flops, the colourful polystyrene boards banging heavily on her back as they catch the evening breeze. Under the waterfall, rinsing hair and skin with sweet cold water that clatters unceasingly from the edge of the cliff onto the beach.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We need to get back.’

  In single file, they wobble across the shingle to the concrete steps. Behind them, the setting sun has stippled the sea bright bronze; ahead, the high banks sway with the fullness of summer. It won’t always be like this, but it’s what she wants.

  ‘You do realise that you’ll never be able to come back? You will be locked out of the London market, permanently, and I’ll never see the girls.’

  Lottie said, ‘Quentin, this is what you chose.’

  He put his head between his hands. ‘What can I say or do? All men are stupid sometimes.’

  ‘I wasn’t married to all men,’ Lottie said. ‘I was married to you.’

  ‘You know, someone told me that he wished he’d stuck a knife in his heart before he divorced, because he’s no happier.’

  ‘So, the grass is no greener? Wonderful! That makes it all better.’

  It was the same old argument, but this time he said,

  ‘You’re right. I’m even prepared to live in this place rather than the city I love in order to stay with you. I hate the countryside, it’s full of death and it smells of shit, but even that doesn’t matter. You won’t forgive me because you can’t. You want me to be perfect, because you’re so nearly perfect yourself. But nobody can be that.’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ve stayed together because of the money, and now it’s over.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t only the money, Lottie. Couples who really hate each other can’t spend another second in the same house. They can’t stop quarrelling.’

  ‘Isn’t this a quarrel?’

  ‘No, it’s—’ he stopped, sighed. ‘It’s an argument. Married people have arguments. If you love each other, it doesn’t matter. We agree to disagree.’

  ‘That does not include agreeing to disagree about fidelity, and you knew it.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do to show you that I’m not a monster, is there?’

  Look forward not back, that is Marta’s advice. She won’t be flying off in a chariot drawn by serpents, she won’t be preventing him from seeing his daughters; she will just move on.

  ‘Can we have an ice cream?’

  ‘There’s ice cream at home.’

  ‘I’m thirsty.’

  ‘There’s water in the car.’

  ‘But it’ll be all warm and yucky.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  A sense of urgency grips her. She needs to get home, right now.

  They scramble into their clothes in the empty car park, then drive back past the usual expanse of bungalows, and over the moors.

  ‘Mummy, can we have pancakes for tea?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  ‘Daddy showed us how to make them.’

  ‘Did he? That’s nice.’

  Lottie drives as fast as she can. They will not be exiled from London. Marta has said that, as she herself will only be flitting back occasionally (‘Ryanair to Perugia, my darling, so convenient even if fat people complain about them’), they can borrow her new flat whenever they need, adding,

  ‘As long as you never lend the keys to Quentin.’

  ‘No, that won’t be happening.’

  Going down the long lane to Home Farm, she thinks again how strange it is to feel so at home here. Rationally, she knows that nature is indifferent to her existence; only to her it feels intimately involved in her life. The huge ash tree by the house, whose silhouette and long black-clawed buds once frightened her, has become an eccentric king fronded with rippling plumes; the buzzard breaking from its boughs to sail over the valley is a benign familiar; the ferns all along the deep lanes seem to wave in friendly greeting. Quentin is wrong. The countryside is full of life, and it smells of green.

  The slope of the drive means she always turns off the engine for the last two hundred metres, saving fuel and sliding down noiselessly, with the grasses gently scratching the undercarriage. When she stops, the cooling engine ticks like a clock. She’s surprised to see Janet’s car there, beside Quentin’s. It’s late for her to be working.

  Luckily, the girls have fallen asleep on the back seat. Maybe I can get supper going before they wake up, Lottie thinks. Or maybe I can catch Quentin at it. She leaves them there, pushing her door gently shut.

  She goes into the boot-room, and through to the kitchen to start making some supper. Fat flies are battering themselves against the windows. Predictably Quentin has prepared nothing; he is so selfish it should not surprise. She opens the fridge, and begins to root around for an onion. Someone looms up from the other side. Lottie jumps.

  ‘Oh! Hello Dawn.’

  She’s sorry for the girl, but annoyed at finding her in the house. In her deepest self she knows it’s prejudice, and she is ashamed of herself for reacting like this. Dawn, so lacking in animation, so fat and odd, is just not welcome. Janet has no business bringing her along when she’s here to work.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  Dawn shakes her head, and puts her finger to her lips.

  ‘Poorly,’ says Dawn, in her croaky little voice, like an old woman.

  ‘What?’

  She follows Dawn, who trundles through the boot-room and the playroom beneath her own bedroom that the girls have littered with toys; then, just inside the living room, stops.

  Puzzled, Lottie stops too, and hears a noise by the stairwell. She can’t see who is making it, or how, and for a moment she thinks some large animal might be trapped there, a dog perhaps, or a badger. Then she thinks that she has caught Quentin in flagrante, for the grunting and panting could well be those of sex.

  Only when she actually sees her husband does she realise that he’s fighting, and that the person fighting back is Janet. Has he gone completely mad? She’s about to shout at him, when the figures shift, and everything changes.

  Janet is holding something which she recognises as one of Quentin’s special knives. It has a curved black handle and a shiny curved steel blade. Lottie knows how perfectly it is balanced, how from tip to shaft it is sharp enough to slice through flesh and bone with hardly any effort. Janet is using it to try and stab her husband.

  Quentin’s face is so white he looks like his own death mask. Janet’s face too has a strange cast. Her dark eyes glitter, and she wears a grin like that on a dog. Lottie knows, instantly and instinctively, that she is mad. The hair on her neck prickles with intense fear. Until now she has always pitied the insane; now she understands why the sane have always shrunk from them.

  All this takes seconds to see and understand.

  ‘Stop,’ Quentin says.

  All Lottie can think of is getting away, only her body, as if under enchantment, has stiffened into icy immobility. If she could, she would run, and drive far, far away with her sleeping daughters. Quentin is a man, bigger and stronger than she, and he can be left to cope with this, or not. Hasn’t she wished herself a widow? Only there is Xan, and with this thought the horror dawns. Where is he?

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ Janet pants. ‘I’ll kill you all.’

  The knife in her hand is like a rip in the air.

  ‘Leave him,’ Quentin says: not Quentin as he has been, despicable, dishonest, unfaithful, selfish, but the person who is not running away.

  Before she had children, Lottie had been fearless. Fast cars, bungee jumps, rock-climbing were a challenge; but from then on, every bad thing that could happen to them ran in the back of her mind (and somet
imes the front) every day, on a loop. Once, in the early stages of their courtship, she had asked Quentin what he’d do if attacked, and he’d always answered, ‘Run.’ Yet he has stayed, for her son.

  ‘Oh God,’ Lottie says.

  Her husband warns her off with a rapid, furtive movement.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ she says, in a trembling voice, only there’s no signal on her mobile. The bars that show reception have shrunk to nothing, as if they, too, are afraid. She lies, ‘They’re coming right now. Just leave.’

  They all know it’s hopeless.

  Quentin is tiring. Something dark and sticky is everywhere, like paint but not like paint. Why is there such a mess? The walls she painted white are all smeared and spattered and smudged. Then she understands: Quentin has been stabbed. His chest is bleeding, and his shoulder. There is a slash across his forearm.

  Rage fills Lottie, so enormous it blots out fear. She shouts,

  ‘Janet!’

  Janet makes no answer. Her short bulk makes her much more frightening, not less. Quentin, being tall, is at a disadvantage. He’s not used to violence, and even chopping logs hasn’t made him as strong as someone who has done physical labour for many years. Yet surely the two of them can overpower her. Lottie grabs a cushion from the sofa with the wild idea of using it to stop the blade, and is about to dart forwards when Quentin, his eyes never leaving Janet’s face says,

  ‘Help Xan.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Sin-bin,’ Quentin says.

  Janet cackles. ‘Sin-bin,’ she repeats. ‘Oh yes, with a cat.’

  ‘You put a cat in there with him?’

  Lottie comes out of the fog of incredulity that any of this could be happening and is about to fling herself forwards but then Quentin staggers back, and hits his head on the low door frame. He collapses onto his knees. Lottie shrieks in horror.

  ‘Oh God, oh no.’

  In the background, Dawn says, in a hopeless voice,

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, stop. Please.’

  Lottie hates violence, she can’t watch it in films without flinching, but in those few seconds she knows that she is perfectly able to kill, too. Her trembling stops and a cold rage blazes in her veins, as if her blood had been replaced by something else. The poker by the wood-burner is too short. Something like a lance or a spear, something to hold the assailant beyond arm’s length, and there it is, the ugly floor lamp, with its long steel pipes and a metal disc like a small shield at the end of it. It’s in her hands, the heavy base acting as a perfect counterweight, and then Lottie advances, knocking the knife away.