Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  ‘I’d forgotten we even had a camera.’ He had continued perusing another. The little automatic we’d taken on our honeymoon was in its usual place, hanging by its helpful nylon wrist strap with our coats in the hall.

  ‘They say digital’s just as good these days … and my Nokia’s got 4.2 megapixels …’

  I felt myself begin to yawn.

  ‘… But these look better than anything I ever get with that.’

  Bla, bla, bla, I wasn’t really listening, but then he said that strange thing when he saw the photograph that Ivan had taken of me. Strange, but also, I now realised, rather tender.

  I started with the phone. By some miracle Laura Idlewild, the boys’ favourite babysitter, was not only free but agreed to stay the night. I chose my dress with care, mindful of what splendid thing might be slinked around Sadie’s body in honour of Simon and Tim’s birthdays. I found the most recent pair of birthday shoes, still in their box and with unblemished soles.

  ‘Tart!’ My mother’s voice broke in as I buckled the ankle strap of the first shoe. ‘Tart!’ They were plain black; their only detail a round sparkly buckle. The shape of the buckle reminded me of the first pair I’d ever bought with my own money, though these were much nicer and satin. They’d been vinyl, the cheapest. ‘Why would you want to look like a tart?’ She was shaking with rage, a black platform dangling by its plastic strap like a naughty kitten from each hand. ‘Who sells shoes like this to a twelve-year-old girl?’ Then the march of shame back to the shop, arriving by the scruff of neck, legs dangling. ‘How dare you sell her these? Refund her money right now!’ The Saturday girl was Kim Nockolds; she already bullied me. ‘Knuckles’, she was called at school. I buckled the second satin strap around my ankle, stood up, and found to my surprise that I was able to walk in a reasonably stable fashion.

  Next I booked a room with a sea view at the hotel on Marine Parade, a stroll away from L’Artichaut. I unrolled some sheets of greaseproof paper and masked off the sitting room window and drew the curtains until the light fell in a diffused beam across the chair.

  I held you to me and there was nothing to think about but you and me and what we were about to do. You. My heart was thumping, I was starting to feel wildly elated. You’d put the spark back into my eye. I used Ivan’s giant teddy bear to focus and frame.

  The light was perfect: almost amber. If I was quick I would be at Morganna’s by three o’clock. She would think I was a narcissist but never mind. The thought of Tim’s face when Simon unwrapped my present made me laugh out loud. I started to pull off my dress.

  A REGULAR CHERUB

  She had been on her haunches long enough to feel the first chill of evening rise from the brick path. Her hands busy with the Honesty, peeling seed pods, and only slightly ashamed of how pleasant it felt, doing something, anything, away from the baby. She was an Impressionist peasant picking wheat in the fields, in a lovely full skirt, not a piously suffering Madonna having to gaze for ever at one of those freaky little Jesus Christs with their prematurely adult faces. Not that her own baby had a strangely adult face, God forbid, and she didn’t find him freaky. But this golden evening, when she was supposed to be already back from the chickens, she could almost believe that it was harvest time and the ache in her back had been put there by Millet.

  Tilda excelled at small, fiddly work, at getting to the gleam within the gloom. As a picture restorer she had specialised in eighteenth-century miniatures and last year a trio painted in grisaille on translucent slivers of ivory, rather sentimentally, had the chopped hair of departed beloveds dissolved into the watercolour.

  She peeled another pod to reveal the silicula, a disc as thin as a fish scale and silvery as a full moon. She’d added a tiny snip of her own hair to the solvent for the restoration. ‘My final commission,’ she’d said, sighing, when it was done, though Callum wouldn’t have it: ‘Plenty of people around here have pictures that need restoring,’ he said. The seeds dropped away to the flowerbed. Clay soil everywhere for miles. Honesty growing like weeds.

  Lunaria Annua, she’d looked it up: purple flowers in the summer, a favourite with butterflies; known also as the Money Tree or Silver Dollar because of its pods. And Honesty because of the transparency, she supposed.

  She held a single peeled moon against the mauvening sky, and then closer to her eye like a monocle, but found that she couldn’t see through it after all. So, really quite dishonest: not as it appeared. She stood up, stretching, and braced herself to return to the house and the baby she was supposed to love with a large chunk of her heart.

  She took the branch of Honesty for Callum, its silver moons nodding as she walked up the path, but left the bowl of eggs where she’d been squatting. Her memory’s not what it was: last week she left the baby’s wretched car seat out in the rain and something decided to chew on it in the night. She is beginning to understand those women who say they once forgot to bring the pram home from the shops.

  Callum was waiting for her in the kitchen; muddy overalls slung over the back of a chair, mucking about with the dog, a black mongrel called Bitzer. ‘Bits of this, bits of that,’ he said.

  ‘And lie,’ he commanded, pointing. ‘Down.’

  The dog dropped to the floor like an ink blot but its eyes remained fixed like a disciple on Callum’s face and its heft of a tail thumped the tiles. Not even a year and already the dog sits, lies down, comes when Callum whistles and does a rolling over thing that he says is known as ‘Die for the Queen’, something, incidentally, that Tilda’s sure neither she nor Callum would do themselves.

  Milk bloomed in their mugs of tea on the table between them, and he looked so like a farmer with his raw cheeks and streaked thatch of hair that Tilda almost laughed aloud. It had been a surprisingly short road from the quasi-religious hush of Cork Street to the farm; amazing, really, that her feet had kept up. Only a year since he’d have come home in a suit with real cufflinks and she’d been the scruff in her turpentine-reeking smock.

  ‘Lie and die for the Queen,’ Callum said.

  At this rate it wouldn’t be long before he had a straw sticking out of his mouth and he’d be whistling hymns by Charles Wesley.

  ‘I think I missed my vocation,’ he said, rubbing Bitzer’s ears.

  For a moment she thought she’d been thinking out loud and he meant the whistling.

  ‘Don’t you think I’d have made a great dog trainer?’

  There were many things she could have said to this, shrewish things about the farm: about the stink, the middle-of-nowhere stink; muck spreading; leaky silage pit; the mud and muddle of it all. So many things sprung to mind, most of them brown.

  ‘Dog shit would be the cherry on the cake,’ she said, and they both found themselves momentarily transfixed with that image and laughed, so in the end they didn’t have to trudge up the usual conversational cul-de-sac of the farm versus their old flat in Hackney.

  ‘Danny’s due to get up again when you’ve drunk that.’ Callum snatched a glance at the clock and a gulp of tea. The tea was far hotter than she could ever manage, and the clock, like most of the furniture in the farmhouse, was his mother’s, fixed high on the whitewash above the sink, from where its neon hands kept them in check. Wake, milk, nappy, it was unrelenting: nappy, milk, sleep, with the yawning stretches of time in between when she wasn’t sure what she was meant to be doing with the ubiquitous baby.

  ‘You might need to wake him, or he’ll be a devil to get back to sleep later.’ Callum nagged, but only gently. He stuck his fingers through his hair and gave her his we’re-in-this-together smile. Not for the first time she wished that she could take the baby’s batteries out. Maybe only for a day or two. She’d be better if she could have a rest.

  She handed Callum the branch she’d brought, its moons shimmering.

  ‘Very pretty,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You must know, it grows everywhere.’ She was surprised. ‘You’re the one who grew up here.’

  ‘My mother was
a proper farmer’s wife.’ He was teasing her. ‘Far too busy pickling medlars and digging up swedes, not much time for flower arranging.’

  ‘Too busy skinning rabbits, more like,’ she said.

  ‘With her teeth,’ Callum added, making Tilda giggle.

  ‘Drinking milk straight from the cow,’ she said.

  ‘Milking the bull.’

  ‘Ugh,’ Tilda cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, ‘now you’ve gone too far.’ Callum could be so disloyal about his mother. Sometimes it really helped.

  ‘I reckon Jane’s been too busy killing foxes to manage anything else recently,’ said Tilda.

  This was partly true. Her mother-in-law had, since the anti-hunting bill was passed, taken to using her shotgun with a vengeful finger on the trigger, as though it was the foxes themselves who had cast the votes in Parliament. Tilda put down her tea and tried not to dwell on something Jane had told her that morning, the thought of it still making her queasy.

  At eight-thirty a.m. prompt, a gust of dust and a pair of brown and white terriers quarrelling about which should get through the door first had announced Jane’s arrival. She was on her way between the bungalow that she referred to rather grandly as ‘The Dower House’ and the yard. Tawny-haired, with a feverish high-colour undimmed by recent widowhood, she was eager to get the job done. Jane had plenty of time for getting the job done now that the fun had been taken out of the fox-hunting: ‘Galloping around after some boy trailing a wee-soaked rag from a quad bike.’ She said she really couldn’t abide it, especially since the futility of it all ‘makes the hounds look so stupid’.

  ‘Here, I brought this for the boy.’ She stood a large and rather morose maroon velvet bear with leather-soled feet on the table, bunched up her chins to study it. Its nose and ears showed the balding downside of having once been loved.

  ‘Callum’s,’ she said. It looked lumpy, like it might be stuffed with sawdust or straw. Jane glanced at Danny in his playpen finishing his breakfast: a fat pasha surrounded by a harem of much friendlier creatures. ‘In the cage again, I see,’ she said.

  Tilda baulked, changed the subject: the farm cat. ‘About the tabby …’ She’d seen it in the hay barn, making a nest in the straw. It had growled at her when she got close. ‘I think it’s about ready to burst.’

  Jane was at the table counting out sachets, some sort of powdered antibiotic that came in a large red box.

  ‘Have you homes for the kittens?’ Tilda asked.

  Jane finished counting, flipped an elastic band around the bundle, wrote something in the veterinary log. ‘Don’t need homes.’ She dropped the pen into her bag. ‘The dogs will take care of that.’

  ‘What?’ A momentary lapse. Then acid in Tilda’s mouth. ‘Jane, that’s disgusting.’

  Danny paused from smearing banana along the bars of his playpen and started to whimper.

  ‘That’s nature,’ Jane retorted, snapping the book shut.

  Tilda put the Honesty into a blue spotted jug, placed it in the centre of the table.

  ‘Tilly, it really is about time to wake Danny up.’ Callum again. ‘Do you want me to go? Do you think he’ll be grumpy if he’s expecting you?’

  Callum was always itching to see Danny whenever he managed to break free from the unrelenting lactation and the constant slurry of the cowsheds. Tilda didn’t mention the cat. She looked at him and she looked at the way he stroked the worn head of the maroon bear that he’d found waiting for him on the table and it dawned on her that this farming thing wasn’t a phase; it was more than just a few years of helping the family out: it was in his system. The rhythms set by dawn and dusk ran through his veins, the total darkness and well-earned slumber; she’d never known him happier. He loved the clear night skies and the Milky Way, the misty dawns and the way the farmhouse was cut into the hill and the long shadows of the old trees. He was in the fold to stay: a good son.

  Rooting about in the desk earlier that day, Tilda had come across Jane’s letter, had re-read it, trying to remind herself what tempting bait had been concealed within its seven Manila pages when it was sent to them in Hackney: it must’ve been something tasty, for how else had she managed to reel them in like this?

  She had written mainly about the particular breed of cow in residence on the farm: Tilda had been mistaken in thinking them fairly ordinary black and white ones, for according to this magnum opus, Jane’s cows had a splendid family tree with its roots in the days when Thomas Sidney Cooper painted in the meadows. Callum’s great-great-grandfather Samuel started this line of cows and it had remained unbroken through two world wars. ‘And such a high milk yield,’ she wrote. Erroneously, as it turned out.

  Then, astonishingly, tucked away in its own paragraph on page five: ‘I think your child should grow up on the farm.’ Callum had sworn that he hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy: they’d agreed to wait before telling anyone; after all Danny was still no more than a small prawn then.

  ‘And Tilda could find plenty here to do.’ Tilda was surprised she hadn’t suggested she paint portraits of the cows. Whatever. His father’s health was failing and Callum, she made it clear, would be needed on the farm before calving season.

  ‘I grew up there,’ he said. ‘It’ll be easy for me to feel at home; I’m trained for it already.’ He claimed that Cork Street was making him cynical, giving him migraines: ‘Too much bad art,’ he said. ‘And you’ll have the baby, the air will be better for the baby.’

  ‘There was a piece today in The Times about happiness,’ she said one evening, the baby safely stowed in his cot, she and Callum companionable with a basket between them on the table, shelling walnuts she’d brought, heads almost touching, their fingers staining brown.

  She had found the walnuts in the nettles, fallen all around the tree beyond the kitchen garden, and what was left of summer’s Honesty, not much more than twigs, a few pods mottled with mildew, too battered by the wind to give up their moons. She collected the nuts, cursing the nettles, and then shook a branch of the tree and more came raining down, hard on her head like the rapping of knuckles; a punishment, like the nettle stings on her wrists, for not loving her baby.

  ‘The quest for happiness is a national disease.’

  Callum pulled out a chair and rested a leg on it, hinging himself back and forth over it, easing his back. ‘Why should anyone expect to be happy?’ he said. She raised her eyebrows: it was the sort of thing his mother would say. ‘How do you find the time to read all this stuff anyway?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said, irritated, and then in Jane’s exasperated tones: ‘Failing to get that baby out in the fresh air.’

  ‘Actually, Danny’s got a bit of a snuffly snotty nose,’ said Callum.

  She started scrubbing some large potatoes for their supper, under the water that always felt colder than the water she was used to in town. He put his arms around her and nuzzled her neck. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  The happiness survey, she told him, was based on several hundred people who went about wired up to a little machine that bleeped at random times of the day and night. When it bleeped they had to enter a number between one – miserable – and ten – ecstatic – for how they felt at that moment and type in what they were up to at the time.

  ‘In the end it didn’t really matter what people were actually doing but everyone was at their happiest when concentrating.’

  She was thinking about the long hours she’d spent under the lights in Cork Street moving between the microscope and the fine slivers of ivory; her total absorption, the little rubber bungs in the bottles, the tiny brushes and Q-tips.

  ‘The workers on the production line were no more or less happy than the poets.’

  She thought too of how she’d managed to grasp a similar sort of happiness in recent evenings, before the weather turned, alone in the vegetable garden, the baby mercifully keen on long afternoon naps, pretending she was fetching herbs for the supper, or potatoes to dig, but really squatting down and peeling away at the Ho
nesty as if her living depended on it. She had armfuls of the stuff, enough for the biggest jug, more. It was a hard-earned break, usually. The baby, never easy to settle, always called her back, again and again. She started to cut the potatoes into thin slices; she’d bake them in a sauce of the walnuts with mushrooms and cream. Maybe, she suddenly thought, it wasn’t concentrating that made you happy; perhaps being focused on something simply distracted you from being sad.

  Callum wondered how he’d grade fixing the tractor that morning. ‘Definitely no more than a five,’ he said. He leaned against the Aga rail. He was not really built for heavy work: his long back made him vulnerable to strain. He reminded Tilda of a sad clown in his baggy clothes with his hair sticking up like that and she wished she could stop herself from needling him, but it was hard after a day with the baby, after another morning listening to his mother.

  ‘It wasn’t an awful lot of fun getting covered in oil but I was definitely concentrating on the bugger,’ he said.

  She unwrapped paper from around some lamb chops: they came from a neighbouring farm; all their meat did, in return for milk. He sipped his tea and then perked up, literally brushing down his trousers, in the way that a child picks himself up after a fall.

  ‘Anyway eventually I got it working so I was happy,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a much better man than me.’ Tilda moved towards him for a hug, but Callum cocked his ear at the door to the stairs, in the way that let her know that he’d heard Danny cry, as usual before she’d heard him herself.

  He opened the door with a small bow and a gentlemanly sweep of his arm, gesturing for her to step through it.

  Tilda pinched him as she passed and clumped up the wooden stairs to find her bawling child.

  Danny had finally come into the world, after almost ten months’ gestation, at Teign Hospital, a terrifying fifteen miles from the farm. Had Callum’s truck not chosen that night to have an ignition failure, they would never have thought to ask his mother to deliver them to the maternity suite. Driving wasn’t one of Jane’s strong points. It was two o’clock in the morning so luckily there wasn’t too much other traffic as she weaved indiscriminately on both sides of the road, tyres squealing in mad pursuit of every rabbit that had the misfortune to be lit by her headlights. ‘Run ’em down,’ she said, and Tilda, in the back, biting Callum’s hand with each contraction in an effort to ‘buck up’, would not have been surprised had she started blowing on a bugle.