A Very Big House in the Country

by Claire Sandy

  ‘Just look.’ Mike was irked.

  ‘God-duh.’ Scarlett stamped off, her face red. ‘Is this it?’ she shouted from within the house. ‘Or this?’ The kitchen lights flashed on and off. The hall lit up, then died. ‘Or this?’ The orangery became floodlit, then dark.

  ‘Just leave it.’ Shen took pity on Scarlett and the girl sloped back, telling the terrace at large, ‘I’m going up.’

  ‘Before Mabel?’ Mike smiled, in a transparent attempt to repair father/daughter relations.

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s nothing to do here, Daddy dearest.’ Scarlett readily accepted the olive branch. ‘Tillie?’ She waited until the girl’s head went up reluctantly. ‘I’ll take the bed near the window, yeah?’

  ‘Whatever.’ Tillie went back to her book.

  Scarlett shot her mother a look that clearly said: See?

  Watching Tillie curled up as tight as a shell, Evie conceded that she didn’t make it easy for Scarlett. The girl had the same aloof air as her dad, intensified by the Brown clannishness. ‘I’m out.’ Laying down her comically poor hand of cards, she leaned against her husband. ‘Somewhere out there,’ she murmured, ‘our kids are running riot.’ She hoped against hope that he’d offer to round them up; in marital tit-for-tat, it was only fair, as she’d cooked dinner.

  ‘I hope next door remembers to water the plants,’ said Mike.

  ‘Mmm.’ Evie couldn’t give a single hoot about the spindly geraniums huddled on their patio at home. ‘How can you even think about our so-called garden, with all these grounds to romp in?’

  ‘It’s not “so-called”.’ Mike looked hurt, as if he’d personally laid their balding lawn and personally positioned every weed just so. ‘I miss it.’

  Now wasn’t the time to tell him about the dead rat behind the shed.

  Their terraced house, a jerry-built extension bulging from it like a boil, was too small for the Herreras. Should a seventeen-year-old girl have to share her bedroom with an eight-year-old? No, was Scarlett’s adamant view, and Evie agreed. They had no option, however.

  The garden was a work-in-progress (and always would be). In the kitchen, tester pots of paint queued patiently, awaiting the mythical refit. The sagging sofa was almost replaced each sales season. Even the brightly coloured oilcloth on the dining table – venue for dinners, potato-print sessions, guinea-pig lying-in-states and impromptu quickie sex – needed replacing.

  It was crazy to miss such squalor, but Evie realized, with a pang, that she did. A bit. Crazier still, in that case, to be plotting her escape from it.

  A mind-reader, Shen leaned over the table to hiss, ‘Have you told him yet?’

  Evie shook her head, eyes flashing a warning to be more discreet as, with perfect timing, her phone spasmed in her pocket.

  Mike reached for it. ‘I’ll read it to you.’

  ‘No!’ Evie clamped her hand over her pocket. ‘It’ll be nothing.’ She turned away to scan the message: Sorry. But I’m IMPATIENT! xxx.

  ‘Probably from your lover,’ joked Mike.

  ‘If only!’ Evie switched off her phone, hating how glibly she lied and how trustingly Mike swallowed it.

  The night sprawled, as they do on holiday, time stretching and bending. Evenings back home flew by in a whirlwind of homework, catching half of EastEnders, and small rows about who used the last of the hot water. Here, there was time for cards, for wine and for various games of musical chairs.

  Shen moved to sit beside Mike. Evie perched on the end of Tillie’s sun-lounger. Paula hovered, stood, sat down again. Jon stayed resolutely where he was. When Clive wandered over to a bench, placed as if by design just out of the lanterns’ reach and shaded by a bower of something scented, Evie followed him. He had to scoot up to make room.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  ‘Not a bit.’ Clive was never knowingly under-charming – one of the reasons Evie tended to keep her distance. She distrusted such easy manners.

  ‘I wanted to apologize.’ She set off without knowing where she might land. Suddenly her planned speech was both gauche and – gulp! – insulting. ‘For Mike, I mean. His crass remark. Earlier.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Clive’s bushy brows knotted together. He seemed amused, as he often did, like a man who’s overheard a joke.

  ‘He said . . . oh, something like . . .’ stammered Evie. ‘He said you’re too old to dash about on holiday,’ she said finally, kicking herself for dragging up what he’d already forgotten.

  ‘Oh, that.’ Another pulling-in of his considerable belly undermined Clive’s shrug.

  ‘It was hurtful. And not true. Obviously not true.’

  ‘Hurtful maybe, but correct.’ Clive shrugged. ‘I is what I is. And I is fifty-five years old.’

  ‘Hardly at death’s door!’

  ‘But older than you. I could be your father.’

  ‘Now you’re flattering me. And besides, I’m sure my mother would have mentioned it.’

  Clive guffawed.

  Relaxing, Evie leaned back, drawing nearer to Clive. ‘Mike would kill me, if he knew I was apologizing for him.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Clive. His voice was soft now, softer than she would have imagined that such a gruff, hearty, confident voice could sink to. ‘I’m very good at secrets.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it was a secret.’ Evie was sensitive to that word, these days. ‘I just meant—’

  Clive was doomed never to know what she meant. A terrible commotion began in the distance: loud bangs and shouts as if a riot had broken out in their tranquil retreat.

  ‘Jon!’ Paula went rigid at the revving noises and the inexplicable clang of some huge structure collapsing. Within a second Jon was at her side, arm around her, as if they’d been expecting just such a calamity.

  ‘What the hell?’ Mike led the charge through the house, adults and children and dogs careering over the black-and-white tiles of the hall to fling open the front door.

  ‘We’re being ram-raided!’ shouted Scarlett, hurtling down the stairs in jim-jams and novelty slippers.

  The gates at the end of the long, straight drive were laid out flat on the ground.

  ‘Mum!’ Tillie waded through the bodies to her mother. ‘It’s just some idiots, Mum.’

  Evie held onto Mike’s arm, holding him back, feeling how much he wanted to tear forward. ‘Can somebody call the police?’ she pleaded. A giant vehicle, its head lights blinding, was trundling over the eight-foot gates that Evie had so admired the day before, as if they were kindling.

  ‘Hang on.’ Clive went to the head of the steps and stood between two giant stone urns. Mike, shrugging Evie off, stood by him; Evie knew her husband was brave, but more than that, he was loath to let Clive take charge. ‘Listen.’ Clive cupped a hand around his ears.

  ‘It’s kids,’ said Mike, relieved, angry and boiling with the need to do something.

  Shouts and screams competed with the monstrous noise of enormous wheels. It was more drunken-escapade than killing-spree.

  ‘Who are they?’ Evie wondered aloud. ‘Neighbourhood yobs?’ She’d never used the word ‘yobs’ before; it felt very great-auntish.

  ‘No,’ said Clive, taking the steps slowly and plodding towards the mess of mangled ironwork and giant tyres. ‘It’s a London yob.’ Flip-flops flip-flopping angrily, he yelled, ‘ZANE! Turn that engine off, you damn fool!’

  More screams and splutters. Then the engine died. The lights went out. And the holidaymakers, so terrified only moments ago, hurried up the drive to see Zane atop a massive tractor, its front wheels resting on the bespoke ironwork.

  At the wheel of the tractor was a young blonde girl in bra, tutu and wellies. And there were other females – all similarly under-dressed, all brandishing tequila bottles, all singing a Rihanna song.

  ‘So that’s Zane,’ said Scarlett. Evie knew that tone; Scarlett was impressed by the man-child who’d made such an absurd and expensive entrance.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ gibbered Pa
ula, clutching Amber to her as if they were about to be kidnapped. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘My stepson,’ said Shen, hands on hips.

  Dan crawled across the tangle of the flattened gates. ‘This is AWESOME,’ he proclaimed.

  ‘Aw, innee sweet?’ said one of the girls. There was, Evie noted, quite a lot of vomit in her hair extensions.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Zane. ‘We seem to have damaged this attractive gate.’

  As his harem whooped at this bon mot, two things were obvious about the boy. One, he was the sort of drunk only achieved by conscientious day-long application to the full range of WKDs and Breezers. Two, he was off-the-scale handsome. Like a prince from a tale in the Arabian Nights, Zane had a strong nose, jutting lips and a long, sensual neck. His hair was as black as the night around them, his eyes equally dark, but with a glint. ‘Oh, and hi, Dad.’

  Clive jammed his hands into his pockets, then turned back up the drive without a word, only the vapour-trail of his cigar proof that he’d been there at all.

  Unimpressed by good looks or toothy smiles, Mabel yelled, ‘Put a top on!’ at the tutu girl. She was, at eight years old, an accomplished prig.

  Miles wasn’t. ‘No, don’t – I like your boobies!’ he told the girl, who nodded graciously at the compliment.

  Glaring at Zane, Shen said, ‘You’ve brought shame on your father.’ From Evie, this would have sounded comic, but from Shen it sounded ominous.

  ‘Lighten up, Stepmummy.’ Zane threw an arm around the nearest girl.

  Pulling off her heels to clamber over the wreckage, Shen screamed, ‘Get down from there!’ When Zane didn’t move, she set about him with a shoe and the boy put up his arms to defend himself.

  The girls in the tractor, of course, loved it; in their state, everything up to and including a nuclear strike was hilarious.

  ‘Get off him, you mad old cow!’

  Oooh, thought Evie. Bad move. Telling Shen what to do was never wise; calling her a ‘cow’ was unacceptable; calling her ‘old’ was lighting the blue touchpaper and retiring.

  ‘Hey, you! Slut-face!’ shouted Shen. ‘You don’t get to talk!’ She pointed with such vehemence that the girl slammed the tractor into reverse.

  ‘No,’ yelled Mike, joining Shen on the wreckage. ‘Turn off the engine, love. Come back and get it tomorrow.’

  ‘My dad,’ said the girl slowly, tutu wilting as the ramifications hit home, ‘is going to kill me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Shen. ‘If he needs any help, tell him I’m available.’ She fixed her evil eye on Zane, hypnotizing him out of his seat. ‘You. In the house. Now.’

  As the party, keeping its distance from Zane as if he was radioactive, returned to the house, Evie glanced back to see Mike helping the girls down from the tractor. He’d be consoling and advising them to go straight home and ’fess up, she knew. This confrontation was chicken-feed, compared to what he dealt with at work. As usual, he was on the side of the underdog. Mike’s heart bled for the whole world.

  On the terrace, the serenity of earlier was replaced by a courtroom scene, with the accused slumped on an ornate garden chair.

  ‘I’m so wasted,’ slurred Zane.

  Seeing him close up, as she brought him iced water from a miraculous tap in the fridge door, Evie revised her original opinion. You’re not drunk at all. The tractor had been a set piece for the adults’ benefit, as was this scene. Zane sat carefully arranged, the image of the bad boy caught in the act, one long leg stretched out in rolled-up chinos that revealed bare brown ankles. One fine-boned hand lay across his brow.

  Pacing up and down, up and down, Clive had switched to whisky.

  ‘You could have killed someone,’ said Tillie, more wonderingly than accusatory.

  ‘Yeah – myself hopefully,’ said Zane.

  ‘Oh, please,’ laughed Tillie, going inside.

  The girl’s handle on Zane impressed Evie. For Scarlett, staring at him through her fringe, his handsomeness was all, but Tillie’s attitude hinted at greater maturity. ‘Dan!’ She appealed to her son to stop recreating the night’s events, with his scooter as the tractor, Patch as the passengers and his little sister as the gate. ‘Enough, sweetie.’

  All the while Shen circled Zane, Prunella in her arms, telling him what he was: a fool, a disgrace, a hooligan. She interspersed this with possible punishments. These ranged from the mundane (‘no allowance for a month!’) to the ambitious (‘I will lock you in your room until 2020!’). She hammered him, like a tent peg, but he never even looked up.

  ‘Cheeky little sod,’ said Mike, rather enjoying the spectacle. He stood up, put a hand on Shen’s shoulder. ‘It’s late. Why don’t we pick this up in the morning, when young fella-me-lad’s sobered up?’

  ‘No!’ said Shen. ‘I want to shout at him all night. I want him to be sorry.’

  ‘He’s sorry.’ Mike addressed Zane, making the boy lift his head for the first time since he’d entered the house. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Zane, as if he’d taken a course in How to Annoy Parents with Simply the Tone of your Voice. ‘Sure.’

  ‘See?’ Mike smiled. ‘He’s dying of sheer sorriness.’ Bending to her ear, he said, ‘Shen, let him sleep, and then go for the jugular tomorrow.’

  Shen wavered on her heels. Her shoulders lowered. She was tired too. ‘OK,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But he can’t go to bed without some food in him.’ She thrust Prunella into Zane’s surprised arms. ‘Here. Take her for a trot around the gardens. Make yourself useful for once. I’ll rustle you up some noodles.’

  ‘Well,’ said Evie, standing up. ‘He knows how to make an entrance.’

  The noise Clive made was like a laugh. ‘Hope he knows how to make an exit. He’s on the first train home tomorrow.’

  ‘Aw, come on,’ began Mike, but got no further.

  ‘He’s staying,’ said Shen. ‘There’s no way I’m sending him back to his mother so that she can say I can’t deal with a teenage boy.’ She stalked to the kitchen, where she banged a wok onto a burner and turned the flames high enough to burn a witch.

  Climbing the stairs, Evie plodded in step with her husband, both of them sleepy from the sun and the wine and the drama.

  ‘First-world problems . . .’ said Mike in a sardonic undertone as they reached their door. ‘When I compare what went on tonight with the stuff I see at the housing trust, I—’

  Silenced by his wife’s kiss, Mike put one arm around her and shut the door with his other.

  The kiss was full of intent. Evie meant business. She’d had enough of an arm’s-length relationship. Time to wrench his mind back to them. Once they’d mattered; now they were way down the eternal To Do list in both of their heads.

  ‘Oh, OK.’ Mike smiled, against her lips. ‘I see.’

  He kissed her back, and she felt the hardness of his chest and the strength of his arms circling her. Evie and Mike could always go from nought to sixty when the lights were off. They had this to come back to, yet much of the time they forgot about the engine at the heart of their marriage.

  Need of the most urgent kind, coupled with the tenderest feelings of love, made Evie’s fingers a blur as she tore at the buttons of his shirt. Why couldn’t she pin down these feelings on the page? None of Lucinda Lash’s countless sex scenes could compare to this tingling anticipation, when the air was electric and her flesh jumped.

  Afterwards, suffused with love for her sexy beast of a man, Evie gathered herself. He had a right to know about the escape she’d planned: the betrayal. This is it, she thought. There would never be the perfect time to tell him – he could never ‘understand’, she knew – but this crystalline, intimate moment was as near perfect as she could hope for.

  As she shaped her lips to speak, Mike whacked her hard on the bottom and bounded out of bed. ‘Gotta floss,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’ve got breath like a badger.’ The room was suddenly illuminated like Wembley Stadium and the atmosphere was chased away into the corners. Sticking h
is head around the bathroom door at his naked wife, who lay there wondering what had become of her afterglow, Mike said, ‘And you might think about shaving those legs, love. It was like being jumped by a gorilla.’ He disappeared, and then reappeared to add, ‘A gorgeous gorilla, obviously,’ in case she felt insulted.

  Evie pulled the covers over what had been, just seconds before, a voluptuous woman’s body quivering with sensuality, but was now, apparently, a gorilla.

  She knew Mike felt able to make jokes like that because he knew she’d understand. But lately – and how long was ‘lately’? a month? six months? – their closeness had been erratic, like the signal on an old radio. There’d been buzzing interference, then a burst of perfect music, then more static.

  Would it kill him to pay her a compliment?

  Clive’s earlier comment about her top was utterly beyond her husband. Mike would have to subvert such simple praise – say that the colour matched her varicose veins.

  Evie turned over huffily and closed her eyes. If she was envying that marriage, then she and Mike really were in trouble.

  Outside an owl hooted, and Shen shouted something, very loudly, about noodles.

  DAY 3

  Thursday, 13th August

  dear snowy

  why cant cats go on ther holidays? i want yu here for cudling i had an ant on my finger

  i love yu

  from your owner mabel x

  From a window Evie watched the agitated stranger in checked shirt and gumboots gesticulate at Clive and point at Zane, who was skulking guiltily, like Patch after one of his skirmishes with a full bin bag.

  Phrases drifted on the morning air, already sluggish with heat. ‘Led astray,’ the man shouted. ‘Broken headlight.’ And, finally, most damningly, ‘Young London fool.’

  When Clive’s wallet appeared, the other man calmed down, as if sedated by the sight of the Queen’s face, and soon he was reversing his tractor down the lane.

  Downstairs, in a summery dress that looked so much better on the website’s gaunt model, Evie said to Clive, ‘He had a nerve. That daughter of his didn’t need much leading astray.’