The Next Best Thing

by Sarah Long

  She cleared the kitchen then went down to the cellar to fetch a bag for her trip. The room was lined with bottles of mineral water, cans of food and a chemical suit that Will had bought to protect himself from the fallout of a terrorist chemical attack. If the worst happened, they would tape up the windows and eat baked beans until they got the all clear. Will would sit tight in his chemical suit, but Jane and Liberty would have to take their chances. When Jane asked him why he hadn’t ordered similar outfits for her and Liberty, he said she wouldn’t be interested in living on in a post-nuclear wilderness, and it would be no place for a child. Also, the suits cost nearly a grand a piece, and there was no point in throwing money away on something you’d probably never need.

  Jane selected a small suitcase and took it up to the bedroom to begin her packing. In went the woollen socks and Wellington boots, the outdated tee shirts and holey old jumpers. The good thing about the country was that she could indulge her puritannical fondness for wearing old clothes until they fell apart. She then went into Liberty’s room, and pulled out the jeans that were going at the knee, the sweatshirt that had been once too often through the machine. She was happy to be escaping London, looking forward to breathing fresh air and getting back to basics.

  They left the next day after breakfast. Alison said it was less than two hours’ drive, so they should easily be there in time for lunch. Jane hummed to herself as they crossed the unlovely Hammersmith roundabout, and thought about sitting round a big farmhouse kitchen table. Alison was an enthusiastic homemaker, so it wasn’t too much to expect some home-made chutney and maybe even a vase of early snowdrops to welcome in the new year.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ asked Liberty as they drove over Vauxhall Bridge.

  ‘Not quite. Shall we have a tape?’

  ‘Video Rose.’

  It was her current favourite, a grim modern talc of a girl who does nothing but watch videos all day. At the age of seven Liberty was through with witches and fairies. It lasted them until they hit the motorway, then Jane turned it off in relief.

  ‘Have you got any more homework to do before you go back to school?’ she asked, looking at her daughter in the mirror, small and perfect, strapped sensibly behind her seat belt.

  Liberty’s face frowned in concentration. ‘I’ve got to write my New Year revolutions.’

  ‘Resolutions,’ Jane corrected her. ‘That’s a good idea. What are yours?’

  ‘I want a new pet.’

  ‘You’ve only just got your goldfish. Anyway, New Year resolutions are supposed to be about becoming a better person, not just a list of things you want.’

  ‘I would be a better person if I had a better pet.’

  ‘We might all be better people if we got what we wanted, but that’s not the point.’

  They drove on in silence for a while, then Liberty was back on the case.

  ‘Has Ella got a pet?’

  Ella was Alison’s daughter who used to be Liberty’s best friend before they moved.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jane. She saw an opportunity here. ‘You could get a bigger pet if we moved to the country. Would you like that?’

  ‘I’d like a better pet,’ Liberty repeated, diplomatically refusing to answer on the wider point.

  As they left the motorway, Jane felt a growing sense of excitement. Even in winter, the hedgerows looked appealing. She imagined meeting Liberty from school and walking her home through the lanes, stopping to pick up leaf skeletons and leaving frosty footprints on the stile as they took a shortcut through the fields. Instead of watching television she would be outside, feeding hens and rabbits and learning to ride.

  The road to Rodmell was pretty, provided you turned a blind eye to the occasional flush of executive-home developments. Alison’s house was in a perfect country lane, the kind you see on Victorian paintings, with boys in knickerbockers and flat caps using sticks to bowl along hoops. This is what I want, thought Jane as she pulled the old-fashioned doorbell. If she could live somewhere like this, she wouldn’t be led astray by chance encounters at the cinema. She’d spend her afternoons alone in the greenhouse, and make nourishing dishes with home-grown leeks. Will might let her have another baby which would lie in a Moses basket in front of the Aga.

  ‘It’s gorgeous,’ she gushed as Alison opened the door, ‘you are so, so lucky.’

  Alison looked gratified. She always took it as a personal compliment when friends were envious of her home.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but would you mind taking your shoes off, we’ve only just had the new carpet put down.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Jane, ‘come on, Liberty, let’s get yours off too.’

  They placed their shoes alongside the others in a tight line by the front door. So much for easy country living; she didn’t recall Alison being this way before.

  ‘You look a little bit peaky, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ said Alison. She meant that Jane looked thin, but then people always looked thin when you had put on weight yourself.

  ‘We’re thrilled to be here,’ said Jane. ‘I’m terribly curious to see what it’s like to live in the country, because I’ve been thinking . . .’ She looked round to make sure Liberty wasn’t listening, but she had already gone off upstairs with Ella. ‘. . . that we should do the same thing.’

  Alison nodded her approval. ‘Oh, you must,’ she said warmly, glad to welcome a convert to the cause. ‘I don’t know how people can bear to bring up children in the city, it’s an act of cruelty really.’

  Steady on, thought Jane, you were there yourself a couple of years ago.

  ‘Now,’ Alison went on, ‘you’re obviously dying to see what we’ve been up to.’ She picked up a large photo album from the hall table and gestured to Jane to follow her into the sitting room.

  ‘This is lovely!’ said Jane, though personally she found it a little too fussy. The best thing about it was the view out onto the garden that stretched enviably into the distance.

  “We decided to go for the Modern Country look,’ said Alison, settling into the sofa and opening the album. ‘Come and take a look at these pictures, they’ll give you a feel for how it was before.’

  Jane turned away reluctantly from the window and sat down beside Alison to make the right noises at the pictures of dark and empty rooms.

  ‘So then we had to strip out the joists,’ Alison was saying, ‘but only after we’d treated all the timbers . . . and of course, there was the DPC and the underpinning . . .’

  We’d have to get somewhere that didn’t need any work, thought Jane. It had been bad enough living through that galleria with Will, she didn’t think they could survive another project.

  Alison was talking about the roof damage now, flicking through the photos, showing where the holes were and how they had been carefully patched with matching tiles. Jane nodded, casting her mind back to when she had first met Alison, at the INCT meeting. She must have found her interesting then, mustn’t she? She had worked in publishing, so that had got them talking. And they both loved cooking. But mostly it was just that bond of having babies together, it made you friends with people you wouldn’t normally bother with.

  ‘. . . a special lime-based distemper that actually allows the walls to breathe . . . based on the colours of eighteenth-century . . . we eventually found a plasterer who specialised in the distressed uneven look, no point in making an old cottage look like a Barratt Home.’ Suddenly Alison stood up in a businesslike manner. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s start at the top, shall we?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Jane.

  She followed Alison’s sashaying bottom up the stairs and into the attic rooms. Thank goodness she hadn’t brought Will – he liked talking people through his own renovation, but he couldn’t stand them reciprocating.

  When they had finished, Alison called the children down for lunch and showed them into the kitchen, where a scrubbed oak table was groaning with quiche and home-made bread, just as Jane had hoped.

&
nbsp; ‘It’s such a relief, moving out of London,’ said Alison, serving up monumental slices of quiche, ‘it makes you realise what life is really for. I used to be so twitchy, always rushing around doing a hundred different things. Now I know this is as good as it gets. Proper meals on the table, making a real family home, it’s enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Jane. ‘Have you made friends? That is the one thing that worries me, finding like-minded people to talk to . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, there are five or six couples that we’re terribly close to, all with young families. We have tennis parties, Scottish dancing evenings, it’s very social.’

  Jane tried, and failed, to imagine Will taking part in a tennis party or doing the Highland fling.

  ‘And when the men are off at work, we wives are always round at each other’s houses. I’ve just started a book club actually, you need to make your own entertainment.’ She jumped up from the table and stroked the handle of a kitchen cupboard. ‘Do you like these? I’d been looking everywhere for matt nickel handles, couldn’t find them for love nor money. I eventually spotted these on a freezer lorry and tracked them down to a warehouse in Hounslow.’

  Living in the country was not so very different then. You could obsess about kitchen fittings just as well as in town.

  After lunch the girls went upstairs to play while Alison made the coffee. ‘I’m definitely a home bird,’ she said, ‘I don’t miss working at all. You can only do the home thing properly when you don’t have anything else to worry about. I actually feel sorry for neurotic career-women with children.’

  Jane wondered if she was included in that category.

  ‘Here, take a look at this,’ said Alison, passing her a dog-eared catalogue. ‘Lakeland Plastics, they do some marvellous things. I’ve got these special Sandwich Triangles that you put straight into the toaster.’

  Flicking through the pages, Jane was struck by the number of handwritten comments that were marked alongside each entry. ‘Oh yes, here it is,’ she said, ‘“Spend over forty-five pounds and get a free Sandwich Triangle. Put a stop to battered butties.” Who writes this stuff?’ She turned the page to find a roly-poly-clog kitchen-towel holder and a decorative margarine-tub holder, ‘as plastic margarine tubs aren’t the nicest things to have on the table.’ There was also a hold-a-napkin clip, which was a tiny chrome hand designed to attach your napkin to your tie when you sat down to dinner.

  ‘Don’t you find it a bit depressing, Ali, all this glorification of homeliness?’ Jane asked. ‘The idea of nuclear families all over the country sitting down surrounded by their domestic gadgets. Cowering at home, safe from the outside world. I mean, how many people honestly need a document shredder? But to read this you’d think you were living on the edge if you didn’t have one.’

  ‘I know, it’s a bit of a joke,’ said Alison, ‘but when your life is your home, as it is in my case, it’s worth investing in.’

  They took their coffee through to the sitting room so Alison could show her the ‘after’ photographs. As Alison took the first album down, Jane noticed with alarm that the bookcase was filled from floor to ceiling with similar volumes, all carefully labelled. Alison turned the pages reverentially, showing the rooms as they now looked, stripped and restored and draped with all the bustling energy of the urban professional come to the country.

  Jane surreptitiously glanced at her watch: it was only three o’clock.

  ‘Goodness me, you’ve been so busy,’ Jane said as the last page of Volume 16 was turned, showing Alison in her decorating dungarees up a ladder, hanging an antique chandelier. It was in the seventh bedroom, which stood empty like most of them, dressed up in Cath Kidston bedcovers, ready and waiting for houseguests. ‘Have you thought . . . that is, now that you’ve done the house . . . what you might do next?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Enjoy it, of course!’ said Alison. ‘I need a rest after all that work. Do you like this room? I was very torn between Gustavian and French Provincial, but looking at that Swedish armchair now I’m sure I made the right choice ‘

  They decided to go for a walk before the light went. Jane was determined to go home with a easeful of mud-spattered old clothes as evidence of happy splashing in puddles. She breathed in the wood-smoke from the chimneys of the pretty houses that lined the street and felt like she was really, properly in the country.

  ‘This is so lovely,’ she said. ‘Just the smell of those log fires makes me realise I can’t wait any longer, I must leave London right now,’

  Alison had stopped to greet a woman in a stout coat and they talked about the produce show, and what a close thing it was for the best cabbage award. I could be like that, thought Jane, I could be a countrywoman with a pantry full of bottled pears and pickled walnuts. I want to get competitive about blackberry jam.

  ‘You see how easy it is in a village,’ Alison said, ‘you get to know everyone. I never spoke to my neighbours once in Shepherds Bush.’

  When the children were in bed, they moved into the TV Snug, a womb-like room off the kitchen, remarkable for its multiple layers of eiderdowns, blankets, coverlets, throws and any other words you could think of to define a length of fabric spread on top of a sofa. They lifted their slippered feet to rest on a suede pouffe. It was so cosy here you felt that nothing bad could possibly happen, the violent images on the TV news seemed so remote.

  Around ten o’clock they heard a key in the door. ‘The wanderer returns,’ said Alison.

  Robert appeared in the kitchen, wan-faced and besuited, padding across the floor in his socks to pour himself a glass of wine. Poor sod, he’d be up again at six o’clock.

  ‘Nice day, darling?’ Alison called out. ‘Did you bring the Standard?’

  ‘Just for you, sweetheart,’ he said, pulling a newspaper out of his briefcase. He walked towards them in the Snug, then paused to feign surprise, peering ahead with his hand above his eyes like a pirate on lookout duty.

  ‘Good Lord, what have we here?’ he said. ‘Is that a visitor I detect?’

  ‘Hallo, Robert,’ said Jane, getting up to greet him. ‘I’ve been admiring your beautiful house.’

  ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s changed our weekends. I never thought I could get so much pleasure from mowing the lawn.’

  He chatted to her about the garden and painted a pretty picture of their new life, so much more fulfilling now than when they were a stressed-out double-income city couple. Nothing wrong with this, Jane thought. It came pretty close to that Ladybird book she had had as a child, where a ruddy-faced son swept the leaves with Daddy while the girl helped her smiling mother to do the dusting. It was easy to knock it, too easy to take a snooty view of normal family life.

  Alison had got up to set out Robert’s dinner on a tray. She wouldn’t have done it in the old days, but it was part of the service these days. He was the one who made this dream possible, he deserved some reward for that daily commute.

  ‘Mind if I join you for Newsnight?’ he asked, setting the tray down on a small folding table then settling down between the women so they were sitting snugly, three in a row. Jane remembered reading that Princess Margaret had just such a table: not even royalty was immune to the horrid democracy of TV suppers.

  ‘This is the life,’ he said, pulling the TV table towards him so the plate was located in optimum feeding position. He took a paper napkin from the tray and fastened it to his tie with one of the tiny chrome hands that Jane had been observing earlier in the Lakeland catalogue.

  ‘My TV-supper heaven,’ he added, forking up an enthusiastic mouthful of food.

  Jane felt uncomfortable in this intimate setting, an intruder in their daily routine. ‘We went for a lovely walk,’ she said, ‘down your street and into the woods.’

  He took another mouthful of food, and Jane looked away. While it was perfectly all right to sit across from someone at the dinner table, there was something repugnant about being down-sofa from someone eating off a tray.

  ‘How’s
Will, by the way?’ he asked, swigging his wine.

  It was a jolt back into her own life after a day of drifting along on the edge of other people’s.

  ‘He’s fine, thanks,’ she said. ‘Busy, but that’s the way he likes it. I still have a go at him every now and then about moving to the country, but I’m not sure it’s going to happen. I’m going to visit some estate agents tomorrow, though, see if I can find anything to change his mind.’

  ‘Oh, he will, believe me. You get so much more for your money here, even now. Mind you, it’s gone up again, there was a house down the road that went for . . .’ His eyes lit up as he told her, and Jane noted that you didn’t get any less greedy when you left town.

  They could move out, of course they could, but suddenly she was losing her enthusiasm for the idea. Will would snub everybody and spend all his time in London, and she would be stuck here discussing house prices with Robert and trying to raise record-breaking marrows. Jane and Will would see each other less and less; far from being a new start for them, it could be the beginning of the end. She needed to get back to London, fast.

  ‘And your work’s going all right, is it?’ said Robert. ‘You don’t find it too much of a strain, with the children.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Jane, meaning it, ‘and I’ve only got the one child.’

  ‘Alison says she doesn’t know how she ever found time to go to work.’

  ‘That’s what people always say when they retire. I just happen to think thirty-seven is a bit young for retirement.’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Alison indignantly, ‘I never stop, Robert knows that.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t mean you,’ Jane added hastily, ‘not with everything you’ve done down here. I think you’re marvellous.’

  Alison smiled her forgiveness. ‘We’ll look forward to being neighbours again, once you’ve made the break. Won’t we, Robert?’

  ‘We certainly will,’ he said. ‘Do you both play tennis?’