'Well, I've got no idea what you are saying. For the past five years every time I've brought the subject up you've jumped down my throat as if I'm suggesting some great horror. It's only a baby.'
'For you. It would be my life. I've seen how it takes over people's lives.'
'In a good way.'
'If you're a man.' She took a deep breath. 'Look, I'm not ready, okay? I'm not saying I won't ever be. I'm just not ready yet. I haven't done anything with my life, Neil. I can't just go straight to having kids without having achieved anything. I'm not that kind of woman.' She crossed her legs. 'To be honest, I find the whole prospect depressing.'
Neil shook his head. 'I give up, Suzanna. I don't know what I have to do to make you happy. I'm sorry we had to move back here, okay? I'm sorry we had to leave London, and I'm sorry you don't like where we're living, and you're bored, and you don't like the people. I'm sorry about tonight. I'm sorry that I've been such a bloody disappointment to you. But I don't know what to say any more. I don't know what to say that isn't bloody wrong.'
There was a prolonged silence. He didn't usually give up this easily, and it made Suzanna uneasy.
Neil turned off the main road on to an unlit lane, his lights flicking on to full beam, sending rabbits fleeing into the hedgerows.
'Let me take on the shop.' She said it without looking at him, facing straight ahead, so that she didn't have to see his reaction.
She heard his deep sigh. 'We haven't got the money. You know we haven't.'
'I'm sure I can make a go of it.' She added, hopefully, 'I've been thinking. We can sell my painting to make the deposit.'
'Suze, we've just got out of debt. We can't afford to go dropping ourselves back in it.'
She faced him. 'I know you're not keen but I need this, Neil. I need something to occupy me. Something of my own. Something that isn't bloody coffee mornings and village gossip and my bloody family.'
He said nothing.
'It will really help me.' Her voice had become pleading, conciliatory. Its fervency surprised even her. 'It will help us.'
Perhaps it was something in her tone. He pulled over and gazed at her. Outside, a mist was descending and the headlights shone blindly into it, illuminating nothing but moisture.
'Give me a year,' she said, and took one of his hands. 'Give me a year, and if it's not working, I'll have a baby.'
He looked stunned. 'But if it is working--'
'I'll still have a baby. But at least then I'll have something else. I won't turn into one of them.' She gestured behind her, referring to the other women at dinner, who had spent a good part of the evening comparing grisly tales of birth and breastfeeding, or talking with veiled contempt about the awfulness of other people's children.
'Ah. The neo-natal Nazis.'
'Neil--'
'You really mean it?'
'Yes. Please, I just think it will make me a bit happier. You want me to be happier, don't you?'
'You know I do. I've only ever wanted you to be happy.'
When he looked at her like that, she could still occasionally garner a fleeting glimpse of how she used to feel about him: an echo of what it had felt like to be allied to someone for whom you felt not irritation or dull resentment, but gratitude and anticipation, and a lingering sexual hunger. He was still handsome: she could look at him aesthetically and see that he was the type who would age well. There would be no paunch, or receding hairline. He would remain upright, taut, the concessions to his years divided between a salting of grey in his hair and an attractive weathered look to his skin.
In moments like this, she could just remember what it had felt like for them to be close.
'You know, you don't have to sell your painting. It's too personal. And it would be better to hold on to it, keep it as an investment.'
'I don't think I could cope with you working longer hours than you do already.' It was not living without him that frightened her: it was how good she was getting at it.
'I didn't mean that.' He cocked his head to one side, blue eyes softened and considerate. 'You could always ask your father for money. For the deposit. He always said he'd put some by for you.'
He had broken the spell. Suzanna removed her hand from his, shifted so that, once again, she faced away from him. 'I'm not going through all that again. We've had to take enough from him already. And I don't want his money.'
At first they hadn't thought of it as debt: they were simply living as everyone did, a short distance beyond their means. Double income, no kids. They adopted a lifestyle heralded in the better-quality magazines, a lifestyle to which they felt entitled. They bought huge matching sofas in mute shades of suede, spent weekends with like-minded friends at noisy West End restaurants and discreet hotels, felt entitled to 'treat themselves' for the most minor disappointment: a bad day at work, failure to get concert tickets, rain. Suzanna, cushioned by Neil's income, and the fact that both of them secretly liked her spending more time at home, took a succession of part-time jobs: working in a women's clothes shop, driving for a friend who opened a florist, selling specialist wooden toys. None captured her imagination enough to make her want to stay, to deprive herself of morning coffee with girlfriends at pavement cafes, time spent browsing, or the pleasure of cooking elaborate meals. Then, seemingly overnight, everything had changed. Neil had lost his job at the bank, replaced by someone he described afterwards as the Ball-breaking He-Woman from Hell. His sense of humour had vanished, along with their cash-flow.
And Suzanna had started shopping.
At first she had done it just to get out of the flat. Neil had become depressed and angry, and had started to see evidence of female conspiracies in almost everything: in the fact that the girls in their local school were reported to have achieved better A levels than the boys, in the sexual-harassment cases he read aloud from the newspaper, in the fact that the human-resources manager who rang up to tell him he was only entitled to three months' salary instead of the six he had expected happened to be female. Alternating between petulant outrage and miserable self-loathing, he became the worst of himself, a character she was unable to deal with. So she had left him to it, and cheered herself up with expensive soaps, ready meals, the odd bunch of flowers - lilies for their scent, amaryllis and birds-of-paradise to sustain her need for the sophisticated. She told herself she deserved it, her sense of entitlement sharpened by Neil's filthy temper.
She persuaded herself that there were things they needed: new bedlinen - it was an investment, surely, to buy the most expensive Egyptian cotton - matching curtains, antique glass. She invented necessary projects in the flat, a new floor in the kitchen, the complete redecoration of the spare room. It would improve the value of the flat, after all. One always got back twice what one spent on property.
It was only a short stop from there to her own personal makeover. She couldn't possibly get a new job with her existing wardrobe; her hair needed cutting and highlighting; the stress of Neil's job had left her skin in desperate need of specialist facials. Her spending became a joke among her girlfriends so she bought for them too. Generosity came naturally to her: she told herself it was one of the few sources of genuine pleasure she had left.
It had made her feel better at first, given her a purpose. Filled a hole. But even as she spent, she knew she had been infected by a kind of madness, that the brightly lit interiors and rows of cashmere jumpers, the fawning shop assistants and beautifully packaged boxes were increasingly less efficient at diverting her attention from the looming reality at home. She gleaned little satisfaction from her acquisitions: the initial rush of the purchase would wear off faster and faster so that she would sit at home, surrounded by crisp carrier-bags, blinking in bemusement at her cargo or, occasionally, weeping after she had felt brave enough to calculate what she had spent. She became an early riser, always up in time for the postman.
There was no point in worrying Neil.
It had taken him almost six months to make the discovery. It was fair t
o say, as they did, some time later, that it had not been the high point of their marriage, especially not when he, pushed beyond his own depression, had questioned her sanity and announced that it was she, and not his redundancy, that was making him impotent. Finally allowing herself to unleash the anger she had bottled up for so long - perhaps made vicious by her own unacknowledged sense of responsibility - she had told him in return that not only was he cruel, but unfair and unreasonable too. Why should his problems have to impact so terribly on her life? Had she reneged on any part of the bargain? The changes she had made were for them. She still considered it a matter of quiet pride that she had not said what she really thought. That she had not used the Failure word, even if, when she looked at him, she felt it.
Then her father had mentioned the house, and although she was still furious with him about the will, Neil had persuaded her that they had no choice. Unless they wanted to be declared bankrupt. The horror of that word still had the capacity to chill her.
And so, almost nine months ago, Suzanna and Neil had sold their London flat. With the profit, they had paid off the debts on Suzanna's credit and store cards, the lesser debt Neil had run up before he managed to get a new job, and bought a small, unshowy car, described by the salesman, a little apologetically, as 'useful for the station'. Lured by the prospect of a three-bedroom flint-fronted estate house, almost rent-free and renovated by her father, they had moved back to Dere Hampton, where Suzanna had grown up, and which she had spent the last fifteen years doing her best to avoid.
When they came in the little house was cold: Suzanna had forgotten to set the timer on the heating again. She was still surprised by how much colder it was in the country. 'Sorry,' she muttered, as Neil whistled and blew on his hands, and was grateful when he didn't say anything about it. Neil was still enthusiastic about all aspects of country living, persuading himself that their move was about quality of life, rather than downsizing, choosing only to see the advantages of chocolate-box cottages and rolling green acres, rather than the reality as experienced by his wife: of people who knew, or thought they knew, everything about you, the claustrophobia of years of shared history, the subtle policing of women with too much money and too little time.
The answerphone was flashing, and Suzanna fought a guilty thrill of hope that it might be one of her London friends. They were ringing less often now, her lack of availability for coffee or early evening drinks in wine bars slowly fraying what she now knew must have been pretty tenuous threads of friendship. It didn't stop her missing them, the easy camaraderie, the unselfconsciousness that had built over years. She was tired of having to think about what she said before she said it; frequently she found it easier, as she had this evening, to say almost nothing at all.
'Hello, darlings. I hope you're both out having fun somewhere. I just wondered whether you'd had a think about Lucy's birthday lunch on the sixteenth. Daddy and I would so love it if you could make it, although we quite understand if you've got something else on. Let me know.'
Always so careful not to suggest any obligation or imposition. That cheerful, yet slightly apologetic tone. The subtlest hint of 'We know you're having problems, and we're keeping our fingers crossed for you.' Suzanna sighed, knowing that, having missed several Christmases and numerous other family gatherings, there were few excuses to avoid her family now that they were, geographically at least, so close.
'We should go.' Neil had taken off his coat and was pouring himself a drink.
'I know we should.'
'Your dad will probably find some reason to go out anyway. You two are pretty good at avoiding each other.'
'I know.'
He liked being part of her family. He had little of his own, one seldom-visited and not-much-missed mother now several hundred miles away. It was one of the reasons he took such a conciliatory approach with hers.
Neil put down his glass and walked over to her. He put his arms round her and pulled her to him gently. She felt herself concede to him, unable entirely to shake off her natural rigidity. 'It would mean so much to your mum.'
'I know, I know.' She placed her hands on his waist, unsure whether she was holding him or just holding him away. 'And I know it's childish. It's just the thought of everyone wittering on about how fantastic Lucy is, and what a marvellous job she's got and look how beautiful and blah blah, and everyone making out we're this super-happy family.'
'Listen, it's not exactly easy for me to listen to that stuff either. Doesn't make me feel like the superstar son-in-law.'
'I'm sorry. Maybe we just shouldn't go.'
Suzanna was the decorative one of the family. Its genetic mythology had ascribed to her beauty and financial haplessness, to her younger brother, Ben, a countryman's wisdom beyond his years, while Lucy had been the brainy one, able at the age of three to recite great swathes of poetry, or ask in all seriousness why such and such a book was not as good as The author's last? Then, slowly, some kind of metamorphosis had taken place, and while Ben became, as everyone had expected, a kind of younger, merrier echo of their straightforward, stoic, occasionally pompous father, Lucy, far from becoming the predicted bespectacled recluse, had blossomed, become frighteningly assertive, and now, in her late twenties, headed up the Internet section of some foreign media conglomerate.
Suzanna, meanwhile, had gradually realised that decorative-ness was no longer enough when one reached one's thirties, that her lifestyle, her lack of financial acumen had ceased to be endearing and now seemed simply self-indulgent. She didn't want to think about her family.
'We could go and look at shops tomorrow,' she said. 'I've seen a place in town that's up for rent. Used to be a bookshop.'
'You don't waste any time.'
'There's no point in hanging around. Not if I've only got a year.'
He was evidently relishing this unusual intimacy, enjoying holding her close. She would have liked to sit down, but he seemed unwilling to let her go.
'It's in one of those little lanes, the cobbled ones off the square. And it's got a Georgian window at the front. Like the Olde Curiosity Shoppe.'
'You don't want something like that. If you're going to do it, do it properly, with a great big plate-glass window. Something people can see your stock through.'
'But it's not going to be that sort of shop. I told you before. Look, come and see it before you say anything. I've got the estate agents' number in my bag.'
'Now, there's a surprise.'
'I might ring them now. Leave a message. Just to let them know I'm interested.' She could hear the excitement in her voice. It sounded strange to her, as if it came from somewhere else.
'Ring in the morning. It's not going to go at eleven thirty at night.'
'I just don't want to miss it.'
'And you don't want to decide anything in a hurry. We've got to be careful, Suze. They might want too much money. They might want an extra long rental period. They might have all sorts of penalties in the lease. You need to slow down and ask some questions first.'
'I just want to get on with it.'
He squeezed her. He smelt of soap powder, and the slightly stale yet inoffensive human scent of the end of the day. 'You know, Suze, we should go to this lunch. We're fine. We're earning again. You can tell them about your shop.'
'But not the baby stuff.'
'Not the baby stuff.'
'I don't want to tell any of them about it. They'll start going on about it, and Mum will get all excited and try to hide it, and then, if nothing happens, they'll all be treading on eggs, wondering whether they can say anything. So, no baby stuff.'
He spoke into her hair. 'I bet Lucy hasn't got baby stuff.'
'Neil, no.'
'I'm only joking. Look, ring them in the morning. We'll go, and we'll be bloody cheerful and have a nice day.'
'We'll pretend to have a nice day.'
'You might surprise yourself.'
She snorted. 'I'd certainly do that.'
Surprisingly, considering it had
been nearly eight months, that night they made love. Afterwards Neil had become almost tearful and told her that he really loved her, that he knew this meant everything was going to be all right.
Suzanna, lying in the dark, just able to make out the beamed ceiling she hated, had felt none of his sense of emotional release. Just a mild relief that they had done it. And a sneaking hope, which she was reluctant to admit even to herself, that this meant she had earned herself a couple of months' grace before she had to do it again.
Seven
Dere Hampton was usually described in its tourist literature as 'Suffolk's most beautiful market town', its Grade II listed buildings, Norman church and antiques shops providing a lure for ambling tourists throughout the summer months, and the occasional stoic walkers in winter. By its older inhabitants, it was described simply as 'Dere', and by its younger folk, those who could most usually be found on Friday nights drinking cheap cider and catcalling at each other in its market square, as 'an effing dump, with nothing to do'. They were not being unreasonable. It was fair to say it was a town more in love with its history than its future, and even more so since it had filled with commuter families pushed out from London and the green belt by spiralling property prices and a hope of 'somewhere nice to bring up the children'. Its tall, elegant, pastel-coloured Georgian buildings stood dovetailed by Tudor houses, with tiny windows and beams, that lurched over the pavement like ships in high seas, all arranged in a haphazard network of narrow cobbled lanes and small courtyards that branched out from the square. It held at least two of nearly all the shops one might need - butcher, baker, newsagent, hardware store - and an increasing proliferation of those, stuffed with aromatherapy oils, magical crystals, overpriced cushions and scented soaps, that one might not.
It had been almost two months before Suzanna realised what most bothered her about the town: that during working hours it was almost exclusively female. There were headscarved matrons in green waistcoats picking up joints from butchers with whom they were on first-name terms, young mothers pushing prams, carefully coiffed women of a certain age seemingly doing nothing much more than killing time. But apart from those who worked in the shops, or tradesmen, or schoolboys, there were almost no men. They were presumably off on the pre-dawn trains to the City, returning to cooked meals and long-lit houses after dark. It was, she muttered crossly to herself, as if she'd been transported back to the 1950s. She had lost count of the number of times she had been asked what her husband did and, almost a year on, was still waiting for that question to be directed to herself.