After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  Since puberty, her inner and outer selves had been refugees from warring tribes forced to inhabit the same house. The interior Penny was like her Yorkshire mother, a person who ironed tea cloths and saved jam jars, someone with quiet values of loyalty and duty. ‘Good looks are all very well,’ her mother said as she caught the ten-year-old Penny gazing in the hall mirror instead of polishing the cupboard beneath it. ‘But a good character lasts much longer.’

  Penny learned to be suspicious of her glamorous exterior. But no one except her mother was interested in her good character. When her absentee father took her to a belated lunch for her fifteenth birthday and told her she was turning into a knockout, she decided it was much easier to make do with the happy accident of natural aesthetics and ignore the guilt about its unearned rewards.

  She became accustomed to people staring as she walked into restaurants, even expected it. But the other part of her, drip-fed by her mother’s homilies, kept whispering that beauty didn’t make you clever or good, that it was a temporary delusion. The whispers stopped some years ago. Time and gravity had produced their own silent harmony.

  Here in the Dordogne, she snipped away at her own hair and bought plants with the money she saved not buying expensive face creams. She wore sensible shoes and shapeless clothes. When she caught sight of herself in a mirror, she barely recognised her own round and ruddy face, so different from the lean anxious blonde staring out of old photographs. These days she was content with her doll’s house project, her garden and her home, surprised by how much she enjoyed the company of this newly integrated self of hers.

  She loved her house too, the way it nestled into the lee of the hill and looked out over the valley; the way only an outline of rough-cut stone was visible from the road, as if whoever built it four hundred years ago wasn’t interested in looking out at passers-by, or having them look down on him or her. She liked that the house was long and low, only one room wide, with windows on each side. Every morning she could walk from the kitchen through the hall and into the sitting room, never once losing sight of the silver dew bathing each blade of grass. She didn’t mind that every wall and floor sent the yellow bubble in her spirit level veering off centre. She cherished its imperfections and never tired of the way the sun seemed to rise in the centre of her narrow bedroom window.

  The gentle half-hour ambles to and from Sarlat were her only exercise these days. She didn’t crave the endorphin rush, her joints didn’t seize up with arthritis as the trainer at the gym once threatened they would, and she couldn’t care if she never worked up a sweat again.

  The path was empty and silent, except for the rhythmic slap of her shoes on the dirt and sporadic birdsong. The air was crisp, even though the first of the spring wildflowers were peeking up between the boulders on the hill behind her. Ahead, the steeply pitched roofs and church spires of Sarlat floated above the mist. It was Wednesday, market day. Soon the cobbled streets would heave with contingents of English retirees braying to each other over the heads of local farmers with their cages of chickens and baskets of vegetables.

  Everything was a tourist website cliché, but she didn’t care; she never tired of the broad lazy river, the blond stone buildings clinging to the hillside and the tiny dim cafés with their impolitic haze of unfiltered tobacco. There was nothing to do here except watch and be. Even Jean-Pierre, the one all the villagers shook their heads at when he passed, couldn’t destroy her sense of calm. One morning she had woken to Jean-Pierre leering through her bedroom window, trousers at half-mast and swinging an enormous penis from side to side. In London, she would jump when the doorbell rang. Here, she sat in bed and giggled as she watched him jump down the ladder and run off, clutching his trousers around his knees. She’d got up feeling invincible and gone outside to dig her vegetable garden all morning, planting neat rows of courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes, ignoring the bleating telephone, always from England, always someone wanting something. She’d never imagined being alone could be so pleasurable.

  A kite cruised above her, its shrill whistle echoing from the hill behind, and she stopped on a bend to admire its effortless flight in a pale sky of torn clouds. There was a faint scent of cypress on the breeze, replaced as she entered the town by the smell of warm yeast and pungent garlic saucisson. From the stalls in the market square, she bought some field mushrooms and half-a-dozen eggs with manure and tiny feathers still on their shells and then, an unusual extravagance, one small white spring truffle. The stallholder raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You have guests, madame?’

  ‘No,’ said Penny, already salivating from the scent. ‘They are all for me. Je suis une gloutonne. Merci.’ She stowed them in her basket. Scrambled eggs with truffle shavings and a glass of wine. Supper for a queen.

  The entrance to the café was blocked by a warring English family. A dark-haired man struggled to control a complicated multi-wheeled stroller containing a screaming toddler.

  ‘How in the hell does this contraption work?’ he hissed.

  ‘Let me do it. It’s a bit tricky, I’m sorry,’ said his flustered wife.

  A prepubescent girl, all affronted attitude in a denim miniskirt and a tight T-shirt, rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she whined. ‘And I don’t see why we had to walk all this way.’

  Penny skirted around them and walked into the café. She wanted to tell the woman not to bother with her squabbling family, to leave them and go off on her own. Instead she smiled, the polite curved mouth of a stranger. Once Penny was like this wife, trying and failing to unite her family during tedious weeks each summer spent arguing in towns and villages throughout Europe. Sandy always complained about the accommodation she’d booked, Matthew refused to eat anything except cheese sandwiches and Emily never once looked up from her book.

  Coffee ordered, she picked up a two-day-old copy of The Guardian. She stretched out her legs and began the crossword, almost giddy with her good fortune to be beyond the annual nightmare of family holidays in particular and much of family life in general. Those interminable hours spent encouraging or commiserating with Sandy as he lurched from hit to miss, while hugging Emily and Matthew until they wriggled free, always trying and always failing to make everything all right.

  She loved her children without measure and looked forward to their video chats, emails and texts. But the weight of that love, how its responsibility had nearly suffocated her for so long that she barely remembered a day when she didn’t feel breathless from it – all that had disappeared. Although it was frightening in the beginning, after the divorce, she liked her freedom now. She liked it a lot, and some time ago concluded it was arrogance that had made her assume responsibility for the success and failure of others.

  There were still two unsolved clues in the crossword. See post go out in March (5, 4). She twirled her pen. It couldn’t have anything to do with Ides, or mail because it didn’t fit the other clues. Nothing came to her. Breaking up may be wonderful (8). Again, nothing. She couldn’t be bothered to try any longer. She was still pleased with herself about finishing the doll’s house. She’d browse the recipes in the back section of the newspaper and see what tasty bits and pieces she might cook for herself.

  After her first winter in the Dordogne, when she’d discovered where the various shops were, how to chop wood and to operate the temperamental wood stove, after she’d scraped and sanded, tiled and grouted, even installed a lintel by herself, she decided the main disadvantage of living alone was the disappearance of her table manners. Most of the time she ate like an animal, gnawing bones, or standing over the sink with bits of fruit and raw vegetables dripping down her chin. It was a minor drawback. She could still remember to use a knife and fork when she had to.

  A couple at the bar were eyeing her table. It was time to go anyway. On her way home, she stopped at the English estate agency just off the Place du Marché des Oies. Nigel, the manager, let her use his office computer in exchange for vegetables and scurrilous gossip abou
t models and pop stars she used to know in London. It was more powerful than her old laptop at home and he never minded that the gossip was often a decade out of date.

  Nigel was out pursuing a sale but the surly Francine, his secretary, nodded and pointed to the empty desk at the back of the office. Penny manoeuvred her basket between the filing cabinets and the water cooler and sat down. Already her mouth was watering from the smell of the truffles.

  Chapter 3

  Jeremy booked for lunch at Albert Hoffmann’s new place. The restaurant fulfilled all his criteria. It was comfortingly expensive, he would inevitably see someone he knew, and it was less than a hundred metres from his offices in Piccadilly.

  The tiny section of London between World’s End and the Ritz Hotel was his tribal habitat. It didn’t matter that he was one of the very few British people living there anymore. Nor did it matter that he chose a houseboat moored on the river in Chelsea as his home instead of one of the white stucco houses favoured by the swill of international wealth always washing into London. He continued to see the King’s Road and its tangle of side streets as he always had: a slightly bohemian village full of workers’ cottages and pubs on most corners where he could always find a man to talk to, or a woman to chat up.

  He glanced at his watch. There was just enough time to read through this last email before leaving the office. It had taken an inexplicably long time to write. Every word was the wrong one and yet there seemed no correct alternative. Every phrase was a mangle. The more he tried to be clear and concise, the more obtuse and abstracted each paragraph became, until the whole thing was such a mess that he had to start again. His final version was not much better, but it would have to do. He closed his laptop and wiped the aluminium cover. Sometimes it was hard to stop looking at the screen.

  Apart from a sleek and impractical phone with the buttons too close together, the computer was the only object on his desk, a large slab of marble that the interior designer had placed in the feng shui commanding position; against the wall, with the widest view of the room and out of line with the main doorway. He’d have preferred looking at the wall, but was happy to go along with her suggestion if there was the faintest whiff of profit at the end.

  Jeremy’s personal taste ran to the clubby and comfortable with some good pictures. But that was too dated, he’d been told, hence the French grey walls, the thick mud-coloured rugs woven in what looked like crop circles, and the anorexic gilded sculpture on the sideboard. Conservative, but still on point, was the message. By comparison, the floor above, where his small team of quants and brokers worked, was cramped and strictly an auction job lot. Not that they noticed. All of them, with their firsts in mathematics and physics, were barking mad as far as he could make out. The kid called Theo ended every sentence with a brisk shoulder rotation. The man sitting next to him, whose name Jeremy never could remember, blinked and stuttered at the same time and Sam, the leader of his team, the one who devised that nifty automated algorithm, preferred not to speak at all unless it was completely necessary. But they did their job and they did it well.

  Jeremy put his phone in his coat pocket and walked to the lift, emerging onto the pavement near Fortnum & Mason. A group of Chinese tourists was ogling installations of upmarket groceries. Twenty years ago he would have felt a boyish surge of superiority, a smug sense of belonging in this place of architectural grandeur. These days he knew better. The era of empire was over. These descendants of diligent rice farmers and merchants were about to inherit the earth. It was their turn and they deserved it. They worked harder and longer. So did their obedient children. If he did what he told his clients to do, he’d genuflect in front of the tourists, kiss the hems of their coats and thank them and their country for making his comfortable life possible. Instead he smiled in a mine-host kind of way and skirted their little group.

  As he approached the restaurant, he thought of Sandy. The night before, he’d pondered the matter on the deck of the Jezebel, swathed in a blanket while exhaling imperfect rings of cigar smoke. A five-year-old San Cristobal La Fuerza, earthy with a slight floral taste. It was okay, but he wouldn’t order them again. You really couldn’t go past a Montecristo Number Two.

  With the death of Jeremy’s mother three years ago, Sandy was the person who had known him longest. Unlike his mother, Sandy had never disagreed with him. Jeremy remembered him in the common room at the beginning of the first term, sitting silent and bolt upright on the sofa as the others sprawled everywhere in their languid way, talking of shooting and stalking as they waited for Sandy, the new boy, to say something so they could dissect him in that casual, cruel way of theirs.

  The black river slapped against the sides of the Jezebel as the mooring rope sawed against the stanchion, making a rasping noise. The ashtray slid along the deck before slowing as the keel settled in the water. Jeremy carefully stubbed out his cigar. The crisp tobacco aroma had changed to a stale sour smell. He put the ashtray to one side and wrapped his blanket tighter.

  Sandy was smart enough to get the only bursary, but also naïve enough to believe that if he liked people and was pleasant to them, the favour would be returned. Sandy didn’t understand that at this particular school it was acceptable to be poor, because that meant you were clever enough for a scholarship; or rich, because that meant your brains or lack of them weren’t important. It was okay to spring from a gene pool swarming with lunacy and its variants. But it was unacceptable to be suburban and ordinary. Sandy’s background was suburban and ordinary.

  None of this concerned Jeremy, even at the age of thirteen. His own provenance provided a passport to travel with impunity. Depending on who he spoke to, he could say with complete honesty that his grandfather began his working life at the age of fourteen in a Midlands grocer shop, or that his grandfather ate his last potted shrimp at White’s, before dying of a heart attack on the pavement of St James’s Street.

  He could map the aristocratic genome from his mother, with a discernible route back to Mary, Queen of Scots. There was no money, however, which made it easy for her to accept a marriage proposal from the son of a grocer. It helped that he had done something ingenious with refrigeration seals and cottoned on to the concept of globalisation earlier than most. Updated versions of the seals extended the shelf life of foodstuffs and liquids in every corner of the planet, including Jeremy’s most recent indulgence, a triple zone wine cooler.

  Jeremy had never regretted making Sandy his friend, which was why the present matter – Jeremy couldn’t bring himself to call it anything else – was unsettling. The loss of control, things falling apart. He knew it hadn’t been easy for Sandy. Jeremy had helped out for years, loaning money he knew would never be repaid, taking Sandy’s pitiful five-figure pension pot into his fund when the normal entry was half a million minimum, organising the sale of his back catalogue when things went bad, always paying for lunch and dinner.

  He would have helped more, had he known how difficult things were. It was part of the contract of friendship and, in his own way, Sandy had already paid his fair share. More than his fair share. Jeremy had to admit that. But he chose not to think about that particular time in their past. Some memories were best excised if friendship was to survive.

  Now, outside the restaurant, he was buoyed by the thought of the lunch ahead. As usual, he was the first to arrive. Tim, who was wedded to his car, had whinged about the congestion charge, but Peter didn’t say anything, probably because he knew Jeremy would pick up the tab. It would be odd without Sandy at the table. The four of them had been meeting three or four times a year ever since university and he couldn’t remember a lunch without him.

  From his corner table, where he could see everyone come and go, Jeremy surveyed the room. Tables not too close together, a good weight to the linen and a fine array of Riedel glasses in front of each chair. The lighting was flattering but not too dim. He could still make out the Freud lithographs of whippets and nudes. All very satisfactory.

  Eating in resta
urants was foreplay for the three things Jeremy liked best: sex, money and chat. He loved the theatre of a good front of house, the flourish and swirl of waiters and sommeliers, the delicious decisions of sea bass or poulet de Bresse, an unctuous daube or delicate spring lamb, each so seductive in its own way. There were only so many good meals left in one’s lifetime and Jeremy decided long ago to waste as few as possible.

  He would have the boned pig’s trotter. Hoffmann always did that so well. Then a bottle of the 2006 Château Talbot. It wasn’t a decision of extravagance. As Jeremy only drank half a glass at a time these days, he preferred it to be memorable.

  Chapter 4

  In the front of the office, Francine was telling a couple with Lancashire accents how easy it was to find skilled craftsmen eager to renovate the derelict barn they’d been looking at. She was fibbing, of course, but the couple would find that out for themselves. Penny logged on to her email account, curious to see a message sent only minutes ago from Jeremy, who usually made do with a Christmas e-card, if he remembered at all.

  She moved the mouse in circles around the desk, then opened the email. It had a picture of a golden eagle flying over a blue sky banded across the top of the page, and came from Jeremy’s business address. He called her his darling woman, said that she should have chosen him and that she still could.

  Sandy, he wrote, had reached some kind of crisis point, not only because he didn’t change the world but also because he couldn’t control it or anything else in his life. It might have been harder for Sandy because he had been successful so much earlier than many others. It was difficult to say.

  Penny had the unkind thought that Jeremy Henderson took far too long to get to the point. Perhaps that was part of his business strategy: bore his wealthy clients into stupefaction so they would sign over their investments to him just to end the conversation.