by Lucy Atkins
Olivia found the Burley guano business amusing, I remember. She liked us to meet in a dreadful artisan bakery in town, with ruinously expensive coffee and tables populated by young men in bushy Victorian beards – a minefield for poor Bertie. It was there that I first told her how Burley had made his fortune in the 1860s. She laughed a lot at that. I remember how her deep blue irises, enhanced by make-up that day, looked almost iridescent.
‘I love it,’ she cried. ‘Ileford’s built on bird shit!’
‘Well, not on,’ I corrected. ‘From the profits of. Guano’s the excrement of Peruvian sea birds. It was used as an agricultural fertilizer; it’s rich in nitrates – nitrogen, potassium and phosphate. But the Peruvian supplies went into steep decline …’
‘No,’ she interrupts me, ‘I know about the guano boom and bust – the sensible businessmen stayed in nitrates and started getting supplies from the South American desert and selling them as explosives. They got very rich out of the First World War – but I guess Burley didn’t do that? I just meant … It’s quite poetic isn’t it, that he built his fortune on bird shit? You know, given that he was such a shit himself.’
I wasn’t quite following her and so I found myself retreating to a subject that made me feel safer. ‘There’s actually a complex and extensive relationship between excrement and the economy. Take your father’s favourite, the dung beetle. They create enormous ecological and economic benefits by clearing and fertilizing the land. They save the British cattle industry about £367 million a year.’
‘That’s right, I read that somewhere too … Where was that? The Guardian? They’re in decline because of the toxic worming chemicals that farmers are shoving down the throats of cattle, aren’t they? My father would be really upset by that.’
‘Well, yes, it is upsetting, very upsetting. Dung beetles are remarkable creatures.’ I couldn’t seem to stop myself, then; it is a failing of mine. When I start to talk about something that interests me greatly I cannot stop, even if my audience might not share my fascination, even though I may want to stop and know that I am embarrassing myself. ‘Dung beetles are the only creatures on earth to navigate using the Milky Way.’ I felt panic unfolding inside me. ‘Ancient cultures recognized how special they are, even if we can’t. The ancient Egyptians had the sacred scarab – they envisaged the God of the rising sun as Khepri, the dung beetle, pushing his ball up from the ground, across the heavens, then burying it again. For the Egyptians the scarab is the cycle of life, rebirth and reinvention – in hieroglyphics it even means “transformation”. Of course, you’re in good company with your own named dung beetle. Scientists on a Natural History Museum project a few years ago discovered a new dung beetle in Costa Rica and named it after Charles Darwin.’ I finally forced myself to stop talking by drinking some tea, even though I badly wanted to tell her its full Latin name.
Her eyes were very wide and fixed on me. ‘Wow, Vivian, you sound just like my father.’ She put her head on one side. ‘You’ve been reading up on dung beetles then.’
I felt my face grow very hot and looked at my wristwatch and then down at Bertie. I felt very flustered indeed then and quite sweaty. ‘It’s five to four.’
‘Oh, right, yes, of course, nearly four o’clock.’ She smiled at me, rather gently. ‘Bertie needs his walk, doesn’t he? We can talk more about this another time, can’t we?’ Her voice was suddenly maternal and I knew that she had seen my distress and embarrassment and was trying to alleviate it. I was grateful to her for this kindness. She didn’t tease me or treat me as an oddity because of what I had said and the way I had said it. She didn’t laugh or humiliate me.
Perhaps that moment marked the beginning of my change of heart. Perhaps that was the moment when I started not just to tolerate, but to quite like her.
Beneath the shade of a crumbling limestone wall, I stop and wipe my forehead on my sleeve. I am puffing and overheated and I am not even at the hillside path. I have been accused of being an emotionless person many times in my life, but I do not feel emotionless. If anything, my emotions sometimes feel far too intense to manage or control. I remember as a little girl, when my father was becoming difficult, I would feel an overwhelming panic rising inside me, a blinding, chaotic sensation. I learned to get out of the cottage when this happened because my father would become even more difficult if he saw me lose control. In winter I would run to the woods to my hollow oak. In the late stages of heart rot, her cavity was cushioned with moist decomposing leaves and fungi and was livid with beetles. I could climb right inside her and curl there, just watching them for as long as I could. But in the winter it was very cold, even though it was sheltered inside the tree, and sometimes I couldn’t last long enough and I would have to go home and face him before he had properly calmed down.
In summer, though, I would hide in the long grass of the cow meadow, sometimes for a whole day and once or twice even overnight. I would distract myself by watching the insects up close. I always loved the dung beetles best. They seemed so busy and constructive. I would get a stout stick and poke around in cowpats to find them coming and going, digging their heads down, re-emerging. I used to imagine that, like these lacquered little beasts, I too had a protective shield, elytra, covering my body.
The elytra are what make a beetle a beetle. They are extraordinarily clever devices – hardened wings that cover more delicate membranous ones, acting as stabilizers during flight, protection against abrasion, or a clever defence against predators. In some water beetles the elytra even trap air bubbles so that the beetle can breathe beneath the surface. But dung beetles were always my favourites. I used to imagine what it would feel like to tunnel deep into a warm place where nobody could hurt me, where nobody would ever think to look.
Perhaps this was where my strong preference for solitude began. I am more comfortable alone, not least at work. This allows me to focus intensely, and to produce excellence, but it has also counted against me socially. I have always been the odd one out, something of a curiosity; the uncomfortable person with the empty seat next to her, unskilled in charm, allegiances or game playing.
It is therefore doubly surprising that I came to enjoy my regular contact with Olivia. The solitude of Ileford without Lady Burley – and later without Bertie – was probably too much even for me and I began to look forward to our fortnightly meetings in the bakery. In the beginning, I think Olivia felt it would be prudent to monitor me closely, but as the months wore on I began to suspect that coming down to Sussex to meet me and talk about the book was her escape too. I suspect that she rather welcomed the excuse to leave her children with the au pair and spend a night alone in the Farmhouse.
She did not invite me to the Farmhouse in the beginning. She gave a little talk at the start about her policy of keeping her personal and professional worlds separate. The same, apparently, did not apply to me, since she was always trying to come to Ileford.
I did allow her to come in a few times, but these visits were difficult for both of us. Her eyes lit up the first time she entered, when she rushed to the foot of the wide staircase and ran her hands over the barley twist spindles and ornate newel posts. She gazed up at the oak-panelled ceiling, which I’ve always found oppressive, and then at the minstrel’s gallery, and said, in hushed tones, ‘My God, Vivian. It’s just splendid.’
I kept her to the presentable downstairs rooms, though she would beg to see the whole house. She would walk through the rooms, touching everything – stroking the balloon-back chairs, picking up a brass candlestick, peering at the dark oil paintings, as if she were trying to connect with Annabel’s spirit through these objects. I did not have the heart to tell her that most of the furnishings and ornaments are not original. Uncle Quentin sold off the bulk of the family treasures and Lady Burley has been through bouts of fevered updating downstairs. Olivia seemed entranced by the Annabel who was taking shape in her imagination and who was I to spoil this for her? Indeed, it was the whole point.
I watched with int
erest as Olivia’s Annabel emerged on the pages. Her Annabel has an acute mind and decisive taste in everything from furniture to books. People find her attractive and magnetic and a bit glamorous, if somewhat intimidating, though really she is very detail-orientated and obsessive – what Olivia calls a ‘nerd’. As one obituary put it, ‘her ideals were high and uncompromising’. Whilst essentially a kind person, she has a tendency towards condescension and pretends to be much more tolerant than she really is. In a professional setting she is purposeful and confident – she is highly intelligent and she knows it – but a deeper insecurity lurks beneath this, a tendency towards self-doubt. She sets impossibly high standards for herself and often feels as if she is not good enough. Whilst never submissive, she certainly cares too much what people think of her – a single harsh comment can derail and preoccupy her. She is highly ambitious, though she disguises that well, from herself as much as from others.
Olivia has, of course, produced a self-portrait, more or less. I have refrained from pointing this out to her. Indeed, I have come to admire her Annabel, almost as much as she does.
I am sweating like an old horse now but the village has come to an abrupt end and I am standing at the entrance to the woody hillside path. I turn to survey the salmon-pink rooftops below and the hazy hills beyond, dotted here and there with holiday homes. A bird of prey floats with unhurried grace across the azure sky. I take off my pack, put it down and unzip it. Fortunately I have brought a powerful pair of binoculars. I expect I am going to need them.
Olivia
South of France, Day Four
It wasn’t until the fourth afternoon that Olivia managed to talk to Chloe. She spotted her alone beneath the vines, in her swimsuit and white cotton kaftan with her book, and for once nobody else was around. She went over and lay down on the recliner next to Chloe’s. Bees fussed around the lavender bushes that bordered the terrace and a gentle breeze ruffled the vine canopy above them.
For a while they talked about how well the younger boys were getting along. Then they talked about Dominic’s grumpiness.
‘Poor guy, though, fifteen’s so hard, and he hasn’t got anyone his own age to hang out with here. The younger ones must be driving him mad.’ Chloe picked at a thread on her kaftan. Olivia noticed the sheen of sweat on her face as Chloe bent and took a swig from her water bottle.
She tried to describe, then, how worried she was about Dom – how he wasn’t speaking to David, though neither of them could work out why. Usually, Chloe would engage in a conversation like this, she’d be sympathetic and helpful, but she seemed distracted. She picked at the thread, shifted, tucked up her golden legs, then straightened them and pulled her straw hat down over her eyes. Olivia began to feel as if Chloe was fighting the urge to get up and run away.
She wanted to admit to Chloe the full extent of her worries about Dom – she really wanted to tell her that he’d been found smoking weed on the school playing field and had been suspended for a week and almost expelled. She wanted to say how concerned she was about the group of friends he’d got in with, and how helpless she felt. Above all, she wanted to tell Chloe what David had done. But she found herself unable to do any of this because Chloe’s edginess was so unfamiliar, so unsettling. It felt like a barrier. It felt practically hostile.
She wondered then if Chloe, like Emma, was thinking that Dom’s behaviour had something to do with her, that it was her fault for working too much and not being there for him enough. Unlike Emma, who could not possibly be a corporate lawyer and hands-on parent, Chloe had, against the odds really, managed to combine motherhood with a thriving career. She had built up her ceramic restoration business from nothing and she now managed high-profile clients and three employees. She had also achieved a level of flexibility in her working life that Olivia couldn’t possibly emulate. Somehow, she always made it to her boys’ sports fixtures and school plays and she was there for them, often, after school too. Chloe had probably never missed a parents’ evening. And perhaps as a consequence of this – as well as Chloe’s essentially Zen approach to living – it was impossible to imagine Ben or Miles taking drugs or not speaking to their father for weeks on end.
Chloe pulled off her hat, flipped her feet onto the ground and sat up, suddenly, facing her. Her green eyes looked panicky as she leaned her elbows on her knees.
‘Oh my God. What? What’s wrong?’ Olivia swung her legs down too, so she was sitting sideways on the lounger facing Chloe. She reached out and touched Chloe’s hot arm. ‘What is it, Chlo?’
Chloe flinched, but then grabbed Olivia’s hand and squeezed it between her long fingers. ‘Liv, I’ve got to talk to you about something. It’s about David …’
The barrier was down, Olivia felt a rush of relief. ‘Oh! He told you? It’s OK. God – I know. He confessed to me two weeks ago.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes, God. I wanted to talk to you about this but he made me promise not to.’
‘What did he say to you?’
‘Well, strictly speaking he didn’t say anything, I found out. I saw some emails from the bank and I made him show me all the accounts. I don’t know how much he’s told you, Chlo, but he’s been monumentally stupid. We went through all the bank stuff together and it’s totally disastrous.’
Chloe said nothing. She nodded, rapidly, and blinked.
‘He’s basically ruined us.’
Chloe covered her mouth with both hands, then. Her brow wrinkled. She suddenly looked older.
So he clearly hadn’t told Chloe the whole story. Presumably he’d blurted something out when they went off together the previous day in the car. She had no idea why he’d done this when he’d made her promise not to say anything. It was maddening of him to ban her from talking to Chloe, then do so himself.
‘Did he tell you all this yesterday? Did he tell you he’s blown all the remaining Intuition money and much, much more?’
‘No. No. He didn’t tell me that.’
‘So he didn’t admit that he’d ploughed a fortune into a high-risk fund? Did he tell you he had this whole complicated theory worked out and he truly believed it would make us rich, and then when it didn’t, he added the rest of our savings, and then when that vanished too, he borrowed to cover the losses? So we’re now getting enormous interest charges that we can’t possibly pay – we can’t even pay the mortgage this month.’
‘No.’ Chloe’s face was as white as her kaftan. ‘My God, Liv,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Well, even with the bits of TV I’ve got coming up I can’t begin to cover it. Our combined earnings are basically nothing compared with the debt we’re in now. So it looks like I’m going to have to sell the Farmhouse.’
‘But you can’t – your father …’
‘I know, but I’m going to have to. I’m lucky to be in such a ridiculously privileged position that I actually have options. If I didn’t have the Farmhouse we’d lose our home at this point. Unless Annabel’s a massive bestseller and there’s some other miracle, I don’t think I have a choice, I’m going to have to put it on the market.’ She couldn’t even tell Chloe about the BBC offer. Chloe would probably advise her to detach herself from the shame, go with the flow and do it.
‘But Annabel could do really well, couldn’t it, isn’t that what everyone thinks?’ Chloe said. ‘And if you got a lucrative TV deal too?’
‘I can’t bank on either of those …’
‘But what about David? He got you into this, can’t he do something to pay it off?’
‘He’s trying. He’s very ashamed and very guilty right now. He’s been calling round looking for editorial jobs, and he’s going to take on a lot more speaking engagements, which can pay well, but he really isn’t going to solve this on his own. It’s just such a massive sum, Chlo, it’s unimaginable. I could kill him.’
‘What about his book?’
‘Oh, come on, he’s been writing that for nine years now and as far as I can tell it’s in pretty di
sastrous shape, so I’m not holding my breath. And we need the money now – soon. Every month that goes by it gets worse.’
‘Oh, darling.’ Chloe squeezed her hand even more tightly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No, it’s OK. Really.’ Olivia straightened her back. She hated pity. It made her feel weak. ‘I’m lucky I can figure out ways to pay it off. I keep telling myself no one died, no one’s sick, the children are OK. It’s just money at the end of the day, isn’t it?’
‘But it’s much more than that.’ Chloe said, vehemently. ‘You can’t sell the Farmhouse. Oh God, and … look … I …’
Miles burst onto the terrace shouting, ‘Mum! You have to come RIGHT NOW!’
‘What?’ Chloe shaded her eyes. ‘I’m talking to Liv.’
‘Ben got bit by a scorpion!’
Chloe leaped off the sun lounger. Her kaftan was stuck to the back of her legs, which were striped from the slats. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s out by the tower. It might not be a scorpion, but he’s blubbing anyway.’
Olivia jumped up, shoved her feet into her sandals and ran after Chloe. Chloe’s cotton sleeves flapped, her bare feet trod lightly across the hot flagstones. She reminded Olivia of a swan, stretching her wings, about to take off.
Olivia
South of France, Day Four
That night, Olivia lay rigid in bed. The children had failed to calm down after the ‘scorpion bite’, which turned out to be a humungous splinter, and they grew increasingly unhinged and combative as the day wore on. There were hours of deranged shenanigans at bedtime as they ran between the house and the tower, panicking about gravestone ghosts and snakes and noises in the upper room; Nura was sobbing because Jess put a praying mantis in her hair; Miles thumped his brother over a Ouija board they had constructed. Paul shoved Jess head first into a sleeping bag, then got in on top of her. Then, when the children were finally asleep, she and David had a row in their bedroom about Dominic.
It started when she asked him to take Dom when he went to buy food the next day. He said Dom didn’t want to go. She accused him of not trying, of opting out. He accused her of neurosis and interference. They snarled at one another across the French bed for a long time, until he shouted, ‘You have to stop trying to control me the whole fucking time! You have to trust me! Just let me do this my way!’
