A Very Big House in the Country

by Claire Sandy

  ‘She thrives on danger,’ said Clive, admiringly, rueful.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Evie. ‘I’d rather play Russian roulette than accept a lift from her.’ She scrutinized the photograph, bending over it, neglecting her dicing: Clive and Shen beamed toothily, Fang in her daddy’s arms, Miles on Shen’s lap, suspended in a cold, clean sky. Evie leaned in closer. Clive held Fang with the same insouciance as he bandied magnums of champagne, but the arm that Shen held around her son was tense, tight. Inside that padded glove, Evie knew, the knuckles would be white.

  Shen always held on tight to what she valued. Her brand of love was red-hot, but Evie knew how safe it felt in the glow of its flames. Back during the turbulent year that Mike hated to mention, Shen had held onto the Herreras with the same ferocity that she held onto Miles in the photo, and with the same audacious style. Who me? said the smile in the photo. Me, scared of heights? Me, scared to relax my grip on my son? Are you cray-cray? Shen never admitted fear and she never harked back to 2009, when she’d propped Evie up.

  Just as well the two friends had such history to lean back on, otherwise Evie would have brained Shen with a ladle as she said, ‘That wooden chopping board you’re using is more or less a dating website for bacteria.’

  ‘Good,’ said Evie. ‘Bacteria deserve love, just like the rest of us.’

  ‘I can’t understand why the kids had no appetite.’ Shen set down the glasses. The grown-ups’ nightly terrace wine-binge was now a habit, no questions asked, with everybody taking up their usual position. Jon was the only absentee, still not home from his lengthy ‘walk’, and eagerly awaited by Paula with the same yearning anticipation Patch exhibited when the kids were due home from school.

  ‘Odd,’ agreed Evie, her face carefully shielded by her helpfully messy hair. All four little ones were excellent conspirators, not one of them letting slip about their lunch-time burgers.

  ‘Be careful!’ called Paula, as the eight-year-olds thundered past on their way to an assignation with a family of snails they’d discovered in one of the shrubberies and had named.

  ‘They should put that on her tombstone.’ Shen downed half her glass.

  They should put ‘Don’t do it like that’ on yours, thought Evie, also drinking deep of oblivion-juice. Every move she had made as they prepared dinner had been dissected. Criticism was to be expected with Shen; she was the type to take Jesus to task, for the shoddy way he plated up the Last Supper. Usually there was an escape hatch; Evie could stand up, announce, ‘Right! Gotta get back to mine!’ and flee the det. 6-bed for her own terraced 3-bed (slight subs’dnce). Here, however, the comments had just kept coming, like bats.

  ‘Instead of salting the carrots, why not just shoot us all.’

  ‘If you slice the cabbage thickly, it retains more vitamin C.’

  ‘I’ve swapped the squash for mineral water. You’ll thank me, when your children’s teeth don’t fall out.’

  ‘Paula, darling!’ Clive was jocular, man-of-the-house-ish, ‘have a glass of wine. It’s good for you.’

  ‘No, no, better not, just in case.’ Paula shook her head, as if he’d offered her pig’s blood.

  ‘Another possibility for the tombstone,’ said Shen, out of the corner of her neat, pretty mouth.

  ‘Lay off.’ That came out a little more sharply than it had sounded in Evie’s head. Perhaps if Shen knew about the affair, her attitude towards Paula would change, but Evie couldn’t risk it. Instead, she made a bold move and stood up from her allocated spot and joined Paula, taking Jon’s empty lounger.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Paula, without preamble, as if glad to share the jittery monologue in her head. ‘Tillie and your girl and that Zane boy. Climbing down from the treehouse. I mean, think of the splinters. And you get Lyme disease from infected ticks.’

  As Shen hummed ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, Mike called over helpfully, ‘I’ll inspect them for circular rashes if you like, Paula. I saw a video all about Lyme disease at the mill.’

  Dreading tonight’s pillow-talk, which was likely to be heavily mill-based, Evie looked at the approaching trio and, unlike Paula, saw no doom or disaster. She could see only three teenagers, flushed and happy, having the aimless fun their age group excelled at. Or, maybe, two teenagers having aimless fun. Tillie hung behind, arms folded, looking not scornful, not bored – what was that expression? It was veiled; the girl was hard to judge.

  ‘Jon!’ Paula stood, eyes gleaming, as if her husband had returned from the Vietnam War instead of the village. ‘Thank God,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, hello, all.’ Jon made his customary curt greetings. ‘I see you’ve eaten. I’ll go and shower.’

  Wash Miss Pritchett off your skin, thought Evie.

  ‘He doesn’t like,’ said Paula apologetically, as her husband’s footsteps receded, ‘being around people.’

  With an arched waxed eyebrow, Shen commented, ‘Then he’s on the wrong holiday.’

  The teenagers reached the terrace. ‘Dad,’ drawled Zane, ‘how come it’s punishable by death when I get pissed, but you and her,’ he cocked his head at Shen, ‘get hammered every night?’

  ‘Her?’ Clive coldly repeated the word.

  ‘Leave it, leave it,’ muttered Shen, putting her glass to her lips, then hurriedly replacing it on the table.

  ‘Get out of my sight, Zane,’ said Clive. The lack of heat in his voice gave the command twice its impact.

  ‘Fine with me.’ Zane slouched off into the house, hands rammed even further into his low-slung pockets.

  Scarlett flashed Clive a look that ricocheted off his sunburnt bald patch, then showily followed Zane, all stomp and elbows. She slowed by her mother. ‘That’s the first thing he’s said to Zane all day.’

  Hesitating for only a second, Tillie returned to the orbit of her own mother, who had already called Amber to her side.

  ‘Am-ber,’ wheedled Mabel. ‘Come and play.’

  ‘It’s too late to be gallivanting,’ said Paula, her arm tightening about the girl sprawled on her lap.

  Gently Evie said, ‘I really think it’s safe out there, Paula. Nothing’s in the bushes.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Paula, her voice a whiplash.

  ‘Well, no, but . . .’ Evie gave up for the moment. She was spinning various plates, and right now she had no energy to spend on this one.

  Comings and goings on the terrace.

  The children ran out of steam and flopped indoors.

  Patch stole a bag of crisps.

  Nuts appeared.

  The elder Browns returned, their faces masks of counterfeit good humour.

  The day dribbled to an end, and night draped itself about the shoulders of the trees and switched off the view of the hills.

  His water-wheel facts finally used up, Mike went for a stroll. Shen plopped into the vacant seat beside Evie and said, low-voiced, ‘Those brogues on Jon?’ She nodded to where the man reclined, eyes closed. ‘Three hundred quid a pair.’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘That tweedy jacket? Savile Row. At least a grand.’

  ‘I hope you intend to stop before you price his underpants.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ said Shen, ‘those understated clothes cost more than you think. A lot more than a minicab driver would spend.’

  Refusing to rise to the bait, even though Jon was indeed the least likely cabbie she’d ever met, Evie said, ‘They live very simply, Shen. You’ve got it wrong.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something I haven’t got wrong.’ Shen moved in closer; this was the good stuff. ‘They don’t sleep together.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’ Evie wondered, fleetingly, if Shen bugged the bedrooms.

  ‘Cleaners,’ said Shen, tapping the side of her nose, ‘know everything. Somebody slept on the chaise longue last night, up in the third-best bedroom.’

  A loud howl came from the gardens, turning every head towards the darkness. Emerging from an outbuilding, Mike bellowed
to the figures on the terrace, ‘I found a snooker table!’

  ‘I thought . . .’ Paula sat back down and kept whatever she’d thought to herself.

  ‘I’ll give you a game.’ Jon strode over to the barn as the others settled back into their positions, Evie pulling her chair close to Shen’s.

  ‘I’ve got a question.’ Evie inclined her head towards Elizabetta, who was dangling Fang at Clive for a goodnight kiss. ‘Why the sexy nanny? With Clive’s track record for trading in wives for a younger model?’

  ‘He’d never do that to me.’

  ‘So he’s changed?’

  ‘No. He’s well aware of my martial-arts skills.’ Shen chopped the air. She took an aikido class twice a week and was given to boasting of how she could ‘take’ any man. ‘He wouldn’t dare cross me.’

  Along with cellulite, and whether or not to open a second bottle, their marriages were two of Evie and Shen’s favourite topics for discussion. Evie shared the good, the bad and the frankly unsavoury. Shen, however, talked flippantly about her relationship. Evie often wished Shen would be more open, more real; she suspected there was more to know, and sometimes Evie felt she was failing Shen by not dragging it out of her. Buoyed by the holiday vibe, she pushed a little. ‘Seriously, though. He’s done it twice already. Divorce, I mean.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Black eyes gleaming, Shen was like a doll in this lighting. A doll with a head for commerce. ‘And both times he was taken to the cleaner’s. Clive can’t go through that again.’

  ‘That’s the least-romantic reason for staying together that I can imagine.’

  ‘Are you lecturing me on romance?’ Shen dipped her chin. ‘I see you, you know, jumping a foot in the air every time your phone buzzes.’

  ‘It’s a fair cop. But pull those claws back in, sistah. I’m genuinely interested.’

  Eventually Shen said, ‘Look, I know everybody thinks Clive has a roaming eye and I’m a gold-digger, but when we met, it was more than just sex and a black credit card. It was love. I fell in love.’

  Did Clive? The question that sprang to mind was so immediate and so disloyal it took Evie by surprise. ‘That’s sweet.’

  ‘No, there was nothing sweet about it,’ said Shen, with a wicked movement of her eyebrows. ‘It was hot and heavy. He pursued me.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t run all that fast.’

  ‘He’s out of shape, I didn’t want to get him out of breath.’ Shen sank back into herself, remembering. ‘We couldn’t get enough of each other. It was secret at first, obviously. Hotel rooms. A trip to Paris, where we never left the suite. We just devoured each other.’ She blinked. ‘God, sorry, Evie. TMI?’

  ‘Nah.’ Evie liked this red-blooded version of events.

  ‘And then suddenly I was pregnant. I know what the Ubers say, but it really was an accident. There was no need to trap Clive. I already had him.’

  ‘It sped things up, though.’ Evie wondered how Clive had broken the news to wife #2.

  ‘Yeah. Suddenly I was a wife, not a mistress.’ Shen picked at her lip, a strangely inelegant tic for such a poised woman. ‘And I remember thinking: were we ready, you know? Was I ready. It’s a very different job description.’

  ‘A lot less flimsy underwear,’ said Evie.

  ‘And a lot more hoovering,’ added Shen. ‘Not that I hoover,’ she added hastily, in case Evie should get the wrong impression. ‘I mean metaphorical hoovering. I decided to always be his mistress – make sure there’s no gap for another woman to sneak in. So, I diarize sex.’

  ‘Diarize? That’s a boardroom word, not a bedroom word.’

  Begging to differ, Shen ticked off the schedule on her fingers. ‘We do it every other day, come rain or shine. Blow-job once a week. Something unusual once a fortnight. And on his birthday we—’

  ‘Enough!’ Evie held up a hand, closed her eyes, wondering how she could rinse her brain later. ‘We’ve strayed into TMI.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you enjoy it, though?’ A sex timetable didn’t sound fun.

  ‘I love it! Clive’s adventurous and sensitive and far more my type than some waxed gym-bunny. But, even so, I never allow myself to be too tired or too preoccupied. I never have a headache. The tasselled bra is always freshly laundered. The stilettos are polished.’

  ‘What if you just feel like a nice boxed set in your oldest PJs? What if you just feel like a chat?’

  Shen pulled a face. ‘D’you think a woman could keep a man like Clive with chat?’ She shook her head sadly, and looked at Evie the way Evie looked at RSPCA posters – a mixture of pity and a desire to help the poor, knackered creature in front of her.

  ‘If he loves you,’ said Evie, ‘you don’t need the tasselled bra.’ She thought about that for a moment. ‘Well, not every other night, anyway.’

  ‘If?’ Shen bristled. The mood changed. ‘If he loves me?’

  ‘I didn’t mean there’s any doubt. It’s just a manner of speech.’

  Shen’s expression faltered, then recovered. ‘Of course he loves me,’ she said, with her best imperious toss of her hair. ‘Damn fool’s too scared not to.’

  The bench was not exactly hidden, but it was discreet. A large palm shaded it from the hoi polloi on the terrace, and Evie found Clive there, just like the night before.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re probably after some peace and quiet.’ She half-turned, but turned back again when Clive said, ‘No, no, join me, please.’

  They sat in silence that wasn’t quite companionable; she didn’t know him well enough for that, despite all the time she spent at his house.

  ‘So,’ said Evie at the same time that Clive said, ‘Well.’ They laughed. ‘You first,’ she insisted.

  ‘I’m wondering,’ said Clive, the tip of his cigar fiery in the dark, ‘what you write on that computer of yours. I’ve seen you lugging it around.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Instinctively, she lied. Just like she told the kids never to do. ‘That’s my diary,’ she said, fast and unconvincing. She didn’t want to go into the sexy aspect of her work; she’d learned that it could fall very flat.

  ‘Really?’ Clive looked puzzled and tickled; a very Clive-ish thing to look. ‘You were in the summerhouse for . . . ooh, a couple of hours today.’

  How come you know how long I spent in the summer-house? ‘Yeah, well, not just a diary. Kind of a fantasy. A daydream. A story.’ She shrugged. ‘I just like making up little stories.’ Evie heard that and hated it; that was the subtext she detected when Mike spoke about her raunchy cottage industry. He called it ‘your stories’, and now she was joining in.

  ‘Nice to have a hobby,’ said Clive.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Evie, who barely had time to brush her own teeth most days.

  Everybody was asleep. The dogs were asleep. The house was asleep. Even the moon had dimmed.

  In a pocket, a mobile phone stirred: if you were here I’d eat you alive. I’m coming (ha-ha) sniff the wind and you’ll smell me xxxx.

  DAY 4

  Friday, 14th August

  Yo

  Wish you were here and all that shit.

  Dad’s being a X@!***. The countryside is worse than maths. But, man, the ladies! I’m in love. Seriously.

  Z

  p.s. Seriously

  The pool was a shattered mirror, chopped this way and that by swimmers.

  Tummy permanently set to ‘in’, Evie was sticky with lotion and dopey with sunshine. The muzak of splashes and exclamations was soothing, once she got used to it. She drifted, drifted . . . until a stabbing finger in the shape of her mobile’s text-alert poked her awake: I know what we agreed but I’m starting to worry you’ve got cold feet. I’m relying on you. Am I mad to do that? xxxx

  Beside Evie, Mike was sunk in his book. From the look of the cover, it involved guns and lots of running about; she longed for something so brainlessly escapist to hide in. She was tethered to real life and couldn’t get away long enough to nap.

  ‘Mummy!’ Mabel, resplendent in her new fish-pa
tterned swimsuit, was at her side, dripping icy droplets on Evie’s chest.

  ‘Yes, sweetie-pie?’ Evie was glad to hear Mabel’s voice. The child had been sulking since breakfast, and nobody could fathom why.

  Breathless with the urgency of her news, Mabel said, ‘I’ve seen Miles’s willy!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Evie, not sure how to arrange her face. Mothering felt too monumental at times. Would a misplaced word here affect her daughter’s relationships for all time? If she laughed (as she was dying to do), would Mabel shy away from men’s trousers for evermore?

  Mabel absolved her from responding by carrying on, ‘It was ’orrible. I feel sorry for him.’ She dashed away, untraumatized, calling over her shoulder, ‘Imagine carrying that stupid thing around in your knickers all day!’

  ‘At last,’ Mike murmured, turning a page, ‘somebody understands.’

  ‘And I’m still sulking!’ roared Mabel as she jumped into the water.

  ‘Excellent, darling! Keep it up.’ Evie shaded her eyes with her hand and watched the glimmering scene. The new swimsuits had been a scary price, but she was glad she’d splurged. Miles was on his fourth pair of trunks, and even Fang was in a new two-piece as she splashed, safe in the sinewy arms of her nanny.

  Beside Shen, who’d teamed her white bikini with stilettos, Evie felt lumpen, as if Shen was a dainty school-girl leading a shire horse; whereas beside Elizabetta, who seemed to be part-sparrow, all sex-bomb, Evie felt like . . . well, she didn’t know what she felt like, because she assiduously kept the length of the pool between her and the nanny at all times.

  Her blow-dry sharp, her bikini destined never to be wet, Shen bent down and barked, ‘Mabel Herrera! Here!’

  Meekly Mabel doggy-paddled over so that Shen could splodge suncream on her barely-there nose.

  ‘Ta!’ called Evie.

  ‘Happy to help,’ called Shen, looking scathingly at Evie over her sunglasses. ‘You just carry on sunbathing and ignoring the fact that your daughter’s nose is redder than Rudolph’s.’