Then it was wiped from his mind, because his mobile rang. It was Barnaby, his agent.
All these weeks Robert had made up scenarios for Ellie Hill, to explain her silence. She had burned to death in a house fire and nobody had told him because his little novel was hardly a priority. Her computer had been hacked by terrorists and she’d refused to pay a ransom. She had inadvertently deleted it and was too embarrassed to tell anyone. She had gone on holiday to Costa Rica and her laptop had been stolen. She loved it so much she was reading it again, slowly, relishing every word. She had been stricken by an intestinal parasite and was laid up in hospital, blinded and unable to read. She was having a nervous breakdown. She was showing it to everyone at Aintree Books, even the canteen staff, because she thought it was so amazing she simply had to share it. She hadn’t even started to read it yet.
‘She’s sorry she hasn’t responded sooner, but she wanted to run it by her editorial director,’ said Barnaby. ‘They’re pretty impressed. Marvellous atmosphere, they said, marvellously authentic. Congratulations, dear boy. They want to make an offer.’
Robert watched his wife on the news the next morning. He hadn’t yet told her his news. Just for the moment, it dwarfed the ongoing carnage in the Middle East. Men ran through shattered streets clutching bundles that were only too visibly children. Horror, utter horror, yet all he could picture was Ellie Hill, his unknown angel, who was now transformed into a paragon of sensitivity and discernment.
He hadn’t told Farida because they’d had a row the night before and it hadn’t been the right moment. There was a sick, curdled satisfaction in this retention of his secret. Their rows were becoming more bitter and forensic; they knew each other’s soft tissue so well, where it was vulnerable to the knife. And yet Robert felt he hardly knew her at all. Maybe this paradox lay at the heart of all marriages. God only knew.
Farida wanted to employ a landscape architect – someone recommended by those Notting Hill wankers with the olive trees. In fact she had gone ahead and done it.
‘Why didn’t you ask me first?’
‘I thought you’d be all for it,’ she said.
‘But I like doing stuff in the garden.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘What stuff?’
‘Mowing the lawn and stuff.’
‘You hate mowing the lawn. You’re always moaning about it.’
‘I’m not.’
‘If you could hear yourself. You’ve no idea how much you whinge.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Give me an example.’
‘Little whinges, all the time. Like when you open the dishwasher and it’s full of clean plates and you’ve got to empty it. You always say “fuck” under your breath. Do you know how annoying that is?’
‘You do, too. A little sigh, as if I should have done it, I’ve got bugger all else to do. You make sure I bloody well hear it, too.’
She pushed back her chair and got up from the table. ‘Anyway, now we don’t have a dog tearing up the lawn—’
‘He never tore up the lawn.’
‘– I thought we could do a bit of a revamp—’
‘You thought—’
‘Maybe install a water feature—’
‘Water feature, what a ghastly phrase.’
‘– against the back wall.’
‘You’ve been watching too many makeover shows.’
‘It’s just a thought.’ She paused, a plate in each hand. ‘It really would be nice if you weren’t so negative. Don’t you realise, you squash everything I say with a little squelch?’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Couldn’t you, for once, just be a tiny bit positive? I mean, it’s not as if you’ll have to pay for it.’
Bull’s-eye. A heavy silence followed this. Farida had won. Financially, of course – she’d made that clear. But also morally, as she was ostentatiously clearing up dinner single-handed.
Their sulks could last for hours, sometimes for days, but this time the row flared up again and Robert slammed out of the house and walked around the block.
It was midsummer and the sky was still suffused with pink. A lone robin sang. Bitterly he pictured the water feature – some wincingly expensive marble slab, no doubt, spouting water into an arid little bowl. How different to that mucky, smelly pond in Wales, and their rare moment of joy.
They hadn’t made love for three months. Farida was already in bed when he climbed in beside her. She lay with her face to the wall, pretending to sleep, but she didn’t fool him.
He put his arm around her. She removed it, however, and gave it back, like a child picking up a piece of broccoli and putting it on the side of the plate.
Now, groggy from lack of sleep, Robert watched her on the breakfast news. All across Britain people were gazing at this face, as blank as a marble sculpture, with the words spilling out – ha, like a water feature! They knew nothing of the woman behind the mask. Her passive-aggression, her sulks, the constant belittling of her long-suffering husband. The way she no longer tiptoed barefoot downstairs in the mornings. The way, when she had a crap in the downstairs loo, she no longer bothered to open the window.
Mandy had broken the love-seat. The special seat in the garden, his parents’ golden wedding present to each other.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she said. ‘It just collapsed.’
She and James were sitting on it, she said, eating carrot cake. But Mandy was obviously the culprit. She was far too fat for its spindly legs.
Not surprisingly, his father was upset. Even more upset than Robert would have guessed. On the phone, his voice seemed close to tears.
Robert phoned Phoebe that evening and told her.
‘Stupid cow,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed how huge she’s getting? You can tell she’s a binge-eater; there’s something underhand about her.’
This seemed a bit harsh, but nowadays he and Phoebe see-sawed in their feelings about Mandy, and this was one of her hostile days.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we get Torren to make him a new one?’
She said Torren could make something special to their own design. He was a talented carpenter and he needed the work.
This seemed a good idea. After his help with Robert’s book – and, to a lesser extent, the newts – the chap was owed something. Giving him a commission might be some kind of thank you.
‘Though it does seem . . .’ Phoebe’s voice trailed away.
Robert knew what she was thinking, about their father.
‘It’s not a waste of money,’ he said. ‘He might live for years.’
Phoebe
Her father’s reaction puzzled Phoebe. She thought he would be more up for it. She and Robert had emailed him some design suggestions but he didn’t seem to care which one he chose, and left them to it. He usually had such good manners; now he didn’t even try to make an effort.
Perhaps the loss of the seat had reminded him, with renewed force, of the loss of his wife. The times he called out, Sun’s over the yardarm, and she downed her spade to join him for a G & T.
He once said to his daughter: ‘Our marriage was one long conversation that was only interrupted by her death.’ How Phoebe envied that sentence! The profound interest in each other’s minds. The depth of their love – a love so deep, in fact, that her deeply rational father had come to believe in the afterlife simply because the alternative was impossible to contemplate: an Anna-shaped void in the void.
That was how Phoebe explained it to herself, at the time.
When she arrived, with the bench, James wasn’t himself. Torren had borrowed a van and driven her to Chipping Norbury. The old man didn’t even stir in his chair when they came into the room. He gazed at them, perplexed, as if he had no idea why they were there – indeed, just for a moment, who they were. Phoebe hadn’t seen him for a few weeks and was shocked by his deterioration. His eyes looked sunken, and there was an evasive air to him that she hadn’t noticed before.
Mandy low
ered her voice. ‘It’s nothing unusual at his age, love. He’s been babbling away about how much he’s looking forward to seeing you and he’ll talk of nothing else tomorrow. He’s just away with the fairies today. It’s probably the new pills.’
Phoebe and Torren carried the bench into the garden and placed it under the magnolia tree, where the other seat had been. Her father shuffled out, leaning on Mandy’s arm.
‘Isn’t it pretty?’ Mandy said. ‘Have a sit-down.’
Torren had done a good job. This bench was sturdier than its predecessor, and he’d carved a swag of leaves along its back.
‘Very nice,’ said the old man. ‘Thank you, Trevor.’
‘Torren,’ said Phoebe.
Her father looked around. ‘The view’s not the same. Has somebody cut something down?’
‘Nobody’s done anything,’ Phoebe said. ‘In fact it’s getting pretty overgrown. I really ought to tidy it up a bit, while I’m here. Mow the lawn and things.’
The old man sighed. ‘I miss my donkeys.’
‘What’s happened to them?’
‘They sold the field,’ said Mandy.
‘What’s more to the point, they’ll be missing me.’
Torren sat down next to him. ‘Know something? Donkeys have the longest memory of any ungulate.’
‘That so?’ Her father brightened. ‘How on earth do they prove that?’
‘Search me,’ said Torren. ‘You’re the boffin.’
Her dad gave a grunt of laughter. They started talking about frontal lobes. Torren was well-informed; like many druggies, he was obsessed by the brain. Then, blow me down, they embarked on a discussion of astral physics.
Phoebe left them to it and went into the house to help Mandy. The kitchen window was open; from the lane she heard a tour guide, talking through a microphone to his coachload of tourists.
‘He’s quite a character, isn’t he?’ Mandy said. ‘Your boyfriend.’
‘My sort of boyfriend. I’m not quite sure what he is.’
‘Oh, well, needs must.’ She started opening a tin of pilchards. ‘I haven’t had time to mow the lawn, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s a full-time job, looking after your dad.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that, honestly.’
Mandy shrugged, and tipped the pilchards onto a plate. It’s all right for you, a lady of leisure. The words hung in the air. Dabbling away with your little paintings nobody buys. Robert had told Phoebe about that conversation, the private income one. It really was none of the woman’s business but it still made Phoebe uncomfortable.
There was an odd atmosphere that day. Her father seemed sunk into himself and hardly spoke. His eyes darted from Mandy to his daughter like a lizard waiting for a fly to land. Mandy, too, seemed watchful and uncharacteristically tense. Only Torren seemed relaxed and, in a curious way, the most at home.
So much so, in fact, that after lunch he offered to mow the lawn. Phoebe watched him trudge back and forth, leaning into the machine, his shirt flapping, his hair tied back in a rag, his back stained with a dark lozenge of sweat. With his long spider-legs he could have been a boy of twenty; at this distance it was hard to tell. He reminded her of her past, of a long-ago holiday when she spent all night kissing some boy in a tent; a boy from the local town who she never saw again, whose name she had forgotten and who probably had grandchildren now. Who might be dead. She hadn’t thought of him in forty-five years.
Siesta hour. The heat . . . the suburban drone of a lawnmower . . . the sky criss-crossed with vapour trails. Down here on earth her father snoozed, finally grounded after a lifetime of globe-trotting. Such a big life, once.
Suddenly he opened his eyes. ‘Do you remember Kunzle Cakes?’ he asked. He closed his eyes again and started snoring, so loudly Phoebe thought he must be faking it.
She sat on the sofa, trying to re-spool a cassette back into its case by twirling it round with a biro, a skill that was now pretty well extinct. Her dad had some favourite audio-tapes that he refused to throw away. Opposite, Mandy was concentrating on a Sudoku puzzle, breathing heavily through her nostrils. Phoebe looked at her stumpy fingers, the nails bitten to the quick. At her soft white knees, dimpled and shockingly nude. Her summer dress was way too short, and did the woman never wash her hair?
Phoebe suddenly longed to go home, to get away from this odd, asexual woman and her unreachable father. She wanted to be in her attic bedroom with her seashells on the mantelpiece and Torren’s arms around her; the view through the window of other people’s gardens with their ramshackle greenhouses and small-town contentment. Today Torren seemed the only normal person here. Even leaving her at the bike show now seemed forgivable – just a typically blokey thing to do, bless him.
The window was open and she watched him mowing. He’d stripped off his shirt now to reveal his sinewy ribcage, skin kippered by the sun, and that endearing softness around his belly. Phoebe had never seen him perform such a selfless task and was suddenly flooded with love. For the first time she fantasised about them living together. She pictured a house like a child’s drawing, four windows and a yellow door, with him and her inside. By now, thank God, the competition seemed to have melted away and he was spending more time with her, eating with her, rifling through her DVDs and generally making himself at home.
‘He looks a bit like Iggy Pop, don’t you think?’ Mandy was gazing out of the window.
‘Gosh, really?’
‘The Iggy Pop of Croydon.’
‘Croydon?’
‘That’s where he comes from.’
Phoebe stared at her. ‘What?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
Robert
‘Where’s she taking you for lunch, this Ellie Whatshername?’ asked Farida.
‘Brasserie Zédel.’
‘Hmm.’ She considered this. It seemed to meet with her approval. You could never tell, with his wife.
At least it was him being wined and dined, for once. Perhaps, when he was a published author, people would no longer ignore him at parties. Certainly not after he’d been on Start the Week and had glowing reviews in the broadsheets, accompanied by a photo gazing thoughtfully out of his shed window, chin resting in hand, the classic novelist’s pose.
Farida’s reaction to the news had been gratifying. Her initial gobsmacked astonishment – You must be joking! – hadn’t been too flattering but since then he had detected, lurking beneath the surface, the respect that had been missing for so long. Not awe, that would be pushing it, but she’d bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate and had even suggested renovating his hut as part of her garden revamp.
Robert was touched, most of all, by the way she rang up her friends to tell them the news. She wasn’t by nature a boastful woman so it was a pleasure to hear her bigging him up – he’s always had a powerful imagination . . . slaving away all these years, I don’t know how ANYONE can write a novel . . . I’m so proud of him.
Proud. Not a word overly used in the lexicon of their marriage. Not even when he was raking it in, during his City slicker days.
So now, freshly shaved and linen suited, he was sitting in Brasserie Zédel, a vast eatery near Piccadilly Circus, swarming with waiters and sparkling with mirrors and gilt. Opposite him sat Ellie Hill, his editor. His editor.
She was even younger than he had imagined. Dewy, eager, and wearing a pinafore dress that made her look like a sixth-former.
‘We’re all so excited!’ she breathed. ‘We all adore the book. Cadog and Llinos and Aled, they’re all so real, it’s such a powerful story, I mean, when they drowned the kittens I was a total basket-case.’
Barnaby, his agent, was there too, raddled and rheumy-eyed, knocking back a Scotch. In the good old days of publishing, chaps like him used to roam the plains but now they were more or less extinct.
‘And it would make a marvellous TV drama,’ Barnaby said. ‘BBC Wales’ll be gagging for it. Beautiful locations and powerful storylines, spot-on for Sunday nights.’
‘I do agree,’ she said. ‘So thrilling. I can hardly wait for you to write the rest of it.’
‘I can already see the second series,’ said Barnaby.
‘Would you like a kir royale ?’
It was the moment Robert had dreamed about all these years. It still seemed like a dream; he couldn’t quite connect himself up to it. He felt he was floating above the room, looking down on his moment of triumph. In the same way, his mythical Ellie still lingered, like a ghost, in her various manifestations, even with the real one sitting in front of him.
She was talking about possible delivery dates for the remainder of the novel, whether the following spring might be feasible. The kir royale arrived. Barnaby ordered another Scotch.
Just then Robert’s mobile rang. Phoebe.
‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take this. It might be about our father.’
He twisted away from them and listened to his sister’s voice.
‘Something awful’s happened,’ she said.
‘What? Is it Dad?’
‘It’s Torren.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know quite how to say this.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been in floods of tears, I haven’t slept a wink. I mean, it’s awful for you but it’s even more awful for me. I don’t know what to do.’
‘God, what’s happened?’
‘He made it all up. He’s not Welsh at all. He’s from Croydon.’
‘Croydon?’
‘Everything OK there?’ asked Barnaby. He and Ellie were looking at him.
‘He’s a total fucking fraud,’ hissed Phoebe. ‘I feel so totally used.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Is it your father?’ asked Ellie.
Phoebe lowered her voice. ‘All that stuff he told you for your book, all that Radnorshire shit, he just made it up. Those words don’t exist at all.’
Apparently Torren had made up the Welsh childhood because it was more romantic. Maybe he’d started to believe in it himself. People re-invented themselves all the time, of course, especially when they came from Croydon. He said most people didn’t ask about his past anyway. Most of his mates were drummers and blokes with dogs, and no doubt not over-endowed with curiosity. ‘It went down well with the ladies, though,’ he said. ‘And it just, like, gathered its own momentum, you know?’
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