Sixteen
Byron Firth was a man of few expectations, but even he had to admit that the house on Appleby Lane was not what he had imagined. He had predicted it would be small, semi-detached, perhaps a little like the house he and his sister had left, or in a 1970s cul-de-sac with a small, boxy garden front and back.
Two bedrooms, his sister had said, and he had suspected it might even be a maisonette or a council flat. But this was a thatched cottage set on a quiet lane in a third of an acre, almost a parody of an olde-English idyll, with heavy beams and flowerbeds.
'D'you want anything else, Byron?'
He leaned back in the plush comfort of the sofa. 'No, thanks. It was delicious.'
'Jason's just putting the kettle on. He wants to show you some plans we have for the garden. Hedging and stuff. Maybe you can give him some advice.'
Byron knew that Jason would want to do no such thing. The two men had never really warmed to each other. Byron regarded Jan's boyfriends - any potential stepfather to Lily - with suspicion. But he understood what she was trying to do and, mindful of their hospitality, he was content to play along.
'Sure. Just say when,' he said.
Summer had arrived abruptly in this small corner of England. In the woods this meant a riot of activity, with green shoots firing upwards from coppiced trunks, and a carpet of flowers at the east side that had lasted weeks.
As his sister went back to the immaculate kitchen, Byron allowed his head to sink on to the cushions and closed his eyes. The roast beef had been delicious. But the sofa . . . He had not imagined how luxurious a sofa could feel until he had spent several weeks sleeping on a concrete floor. He was physically tough, but now he wondered how he would get through another night in the boiler room.
It was taking longer than he'd hoped. The old man at Catton's End had not yet paid for the smaller bitch, and Mrs Dorney from the garden centre wanted her puppy after she had moved house.
He had found a tied cottage three miles away, on a huge dairy farm. They didn't mind the dogs, and might even put the odd bit of work his way, but until all of the puppies were gone, he couldn't raise the full deposit. Even the proceeds of their sale would not add up to the amount the landlord was asking. He would have to take all the overtime Matt could offer.
'Can you help me put this chair together?' Lily climbed on to his lap and handed him the pieces of the dolls'-house furniture he had brought with him. She had shown him her room, and the dolls' house 'Uncle Jason' had given her. It was almost three feet tall, with a thatched roof of straw.
'He wanted her to feel welcome,' Jan had said. 'He made it himself. It's a copy of this cottage.'
He had been surprised by the monosyllabic Jason, and not for the first time that day. Nothing in the man's demeanour had hinted that he might be capable of creating something like that. 'Pass me the glue, Lily.' He leaned forward, careful not to let the little tube drip.
'Can you do the kitchen stuff next?'
'Sure.'
She eyed him with a mischievous smile.
'Mum's friend Sarah fancies you. Mum told her she could have you as long as she took your laundry too.'
She had said as much to him when he'd handed his clothes over. 'Jeez, Byron. How long since you did this lot?' She had held the laundry bag away from her. 'This isn't like you.'
'My mate's machine's broken down. I got a bit behind.' He pretended to be diverted by the garden. It was the worst thing about where he was staying. The nearest launderette was sixteen miles away, which would cost him valuable pounds in diesel. If he rinsed things in the lake, they still looked dirty and took several days to dry. Sometimes, as he sat listening to Isabel's music, he pictured himself sneaking into the laundry room and secretly using her machine. But that would feel furtive and wrong. What if she found a stray sock?
Now he listened comfortably to the distant spin of his sister's machine. A full stomach, a soft place to sit and the prospect of clean clothes. He handed Lily the fixed dolls' chair. It took little in life to make a person happy, when you thought about it.
'She's quite pretty,' said Lily. 'She's got long hair.'
'Byron.' Jason came in and sat in one of the easy chairs.
Byron pushed himself a little more upright on the sofa. It would be so easy to fall asleep. 'Nice place,' he said. 'Everything. It's . . . really nice.'
'I did most of the building work with my dad a few years back.'
'It's better than our old house.' Lily was applying stickers to the wooden furniture. 'Although I did like it.'
Byron smiled at her as he remarked to Jason, 'You'll be giving Matt McCarthy a run for his money.'
'No offence, mate, but I wouldn't have that man in my house. Not with all the stories you hear about him.'
What stories? Byron wanted to ask.
Lily was humming tunelessly as she arranged and rearranged the dolls' furniture. Eventually Jason said, 'Lily, sweetheart, can you go and ask your mum if she wants me to get some more biscuits?'
Lily scrambled up and went to the kitchen, drawn by the magic word. When she was out of earshot Jason muttered, 'Look, Byron, I know you haven't been that happy about me and your sister--'
Byron tried to interrupt, but Jason held up a hand. 'No, let me finish. She told me what happened to you. Prison and stuff. And I want you to know something.'
His gaze was piercing and sincere. 'I will never lay a finger on your sister or Lily. I'm not . . . that kind of man. I wanted you to know that. And I wanted you to know that if I'd been you I'd probably have done the same.'
Byron swallowed - hard. 'I didn't mean . . .'
'Yeah?'
'He fell badly,' he said eventually. 'It was a long time ago.'
'Yeah. She said.'
The 'but' hung in the air. Through the door, Byron could hear the kettle boiling, the clatter of cups being pulled out of cupboards.
'Anyway, just so you know, I'll probably ask her to marry me, when they're settled in and that.'
Byron allowed his head to sink back on to the cushions, trying to digest this latest twist, the new version of a man he had been predisposed to dislike. He was different in his own home. Perhaps most people were.
Several long minutes passed.
'I'll see what's going on with the tea,' Jason said. 'White no sugar, isn't it?'
'Thanks,' said Byron.
Then his sister popped out of the kitchen with a tray. 'I don't know why you're going on about biscuits,' she said, nudging Jason as she sat down beside him. 'You know we finished off the last of the digestives this morning.'
She poured a mug and handed it to her brother. 'You still haven't told me - even though you landed me with half a ton of washing. Who is this mate you're staying with?'
For three days Thierry was sure he had heard it. He had been passing by the barns on the far side of the house and there it was, a growling, whimpering noise, but muffled, a bit like it was underground. 'Probably fox cubs,' Byron had said, when he motioned to him. 'They'll be in an earth somewhere. Come on, we've got pheasants to feed.' Byron had told him you should never disturb wild animals without a reason, especially the young. If you picked up a baby, or disturbed a nest, the parents might get scared and never come back.
But Byron wasn't here today. Thierry stood in the sun, very still, tilting his head to gauge where the sound was coming from. Upstairs he could hear music in Kitty's room, where she and Mum were painting. Mum had said Kitty could have anything she liked on her walls. He was going to ask if he could have the planets. He liked the thought of having the solar system outside his window and inside too.
Around him he could hear the whisper of the Scots pines, their scent wafting towards him on the warm breeze. There it was again. Thierry took his hands out of his pockets and began to walk round the side of the house. He stopped when he got to the rotten old door. Byron had shown him about tracks, and now, looking at the ground, he could see that this door had been opened recently.
He frowned. How c
ould a fox open a door - especially a heavy one like this? He walked forward, put his fingers round the edge and tugged. He stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the dark. The whimpering had stopped.
Thierry could just make out the L shape of the room. As he closed the door behind him and went down the steps the whining and growling started again and he followed it to a familiar sight. He stooped and took one of Byron's puppies out of the box, holding it firmly. He must have put them here to be safe while he was working.
Thierry sat on the concrete floor, letting the puppies jump up on him and lick his face, which his sister always said was revolting.
It was only when they calmed down and were sniffing around that he noticed they weren't the only things in the room. There was a folding chair in the corner, a sleeping-bag on a tarpaulin, a rucksack and a couple of bags. Nearby, he saw the dogs' bowls. A cup with a toothbrush and toothpaste was balanced on the side of a small sink. Thierry squeezed a worm of toothpaste into his mouth. Why would Byron be camping here?
'Thierry!' his mother called, from above. 'Lunchtime! Thierry!'
He put the toothpaste carefully back where he had found it. 'Ssh,' he told the dogs, and held a finger to his lips. 'Ssh.'
Thierry knew all about secrets, why some things were best kept close, and he didn't want Byron to feel that his nest had been disturbed.
A hand remembers music long after it has ceased to play. In the same way Isabel's hand recalled the feel of her old violin long after it had left her. She thought of it as she mimed the Dvorak, imagining the tension of the strings, the feel of the Guarneri under her chin. She would probably never hold a violin like that again, never hear its velvety timbre, feel the thoroughbred shiver of its strings, but there were compensations, she told herself.
Summer had brought with it a kind of peace after the turbulent weeks of late spring. The vegetable patch was flourishing. She had bought a large freezer and put it in the dining room for the excess, and now that the summer holidays had started Kitty had taken on the hens, breeding black cochins, little bantams, huge, petticoated buff Orpingtons. The eggs and chicks brought her a small but steady income. The two doors to the house stood open during the daylight hours, and Isabel would often find an extravagantly feathered cockerel eyeing her beadily from the sofa, or a broody hen nestled in a pile of washing. She found it hard to get too aggrieved; she loved to see Kitty and Thierry bent over the chicks. It was good to see them interested in something, no longer mourning what they had lost.
Thierry spent much of his time in the woods with Byron, bringing back mushrooms, leaves they could use in salads or barrowloads of firewood for the winter. Isabel imagined him shouting for the puppy Byron had now handed over. Her son's expression when he had understood it was really his had made her eyes fill with tears. Say something, Thierry, she had urged silently. Be pleased. Whoop, shout, like the boy you are, but he had walked over to her and put his arms round her waist. She had squeezed him back, afraid to show him how much she had hoped for more.
'He'll have to start training that pup soon,' Byron had remarked, in front of Thierry, and Isabel prayed that the little animal would lead her son back into speech.
That morning, Byron had taught her how to chop firewood. She had been doing it all wrong, apparently. The axe was blunt. Resting one end of the timber on a log and hacking at the middle was dangerous and could blind her. She should split it, not cut it; he showed her how to remove the axe from the wood by hitting the back with a sledgehammer, his strong hands slicing through it with a clean blow. 'It's good for you, though,' he said, grinning as she raised it again. 'Helps clear your head. Therapeutic.'
'As long as I don't chop off my feet.'
Isabel's own hands, meanwhile, grew roughened and scratched from chopping, braving gooseberry bushes and raspberries. She had nicked them with the blades while she skinned rabbits, and her palms were calloused from painting the inside of the house where it wasn't sheathed in plastic. She was determined to brighten it wherever she could. She thought that Laura McCarthy and her ilk would probably consider it a mess, with its roughly painted woodwork, the primitive colours, the murals that trailed upstairs in ivy shoots of green and yellow. She didn't care: every imprint made it feel more like home, rather than somewhere she, Kitty and Thierry had landed accidentally.
But that was the odd thing about the Spanish House, which she could only admit to herself after Kitty had remarked on it. 'I like this house,' her daughter had said one evening. 'Much more than when we came. Even with all the holes and mess. But it never really feels like home, does it?'
Isabel had made reassuring noises about it being unfinished and impossible to judge until it was entirely theirs. About new bathrooms and replaced windows. But she knew that there was truth in what Kitty had said.
Is it because of you? she asked Laurent silently. Is it impossible for us to make a home without you?
Throughout this period, she had avoided Matt - as far as it was possible to avoid someone who was in and around her house every day. Sometimes it was easy, such as when she went out to give violin lessons, which she dreaded. She had developed all sorts of strategies to ensure that she was never alone with him - sticking close to Byron or the other men when she brought out cups of tea, asking the children to accompany her while she completed some task, and saving any necessary conversation for when his son was working beside him. Matt played along, a little less cheerful and talkative than he had been, but sometimes she convinced herself that this new distance suited him too.
There seemed to be trouble between him and Anthony. They hardly spoke to each other, and Anthony regarded his father with barely concealed disgust. If the boy had been anything other than charming to Isabel, she might have worried that he had discovered the truth. Just occasionally she felt Matt's eyes burn into her back, but most of the time she could brush it off.
She was in the vegetable patch when he caught her alone. It was late afternoon, Kitty and Thierry were in the woods with the puppy, and she had decided to dig up some of the pink fir apples for their evening meal. Afraid of slicing through them with her spade, she was pulling them up with her fingers, kneeling on an old sack and throwing them into a tin bucket ready to wash. There was something satisfying about pulling potatoes, about feeling the oddly shaped prize beneath the earth, being happily surprised by its size as it emerged. She paused to push back her hair and noticed her fingers. Once white, they were now freckled, the blunt nails black crescents of dirt. Oh, Laurent, what would you make of me now? she thought, smiling. And then realised, with a mixture of relief and regret, that it was the first time she had been able to think of him without an accompanying stab of grief.
She pulled out the last potato, separated it from its string and pushed back the earth where the plant had been. Then she rubbed her palms together to dislodge the soil, and jumped as she heard a voice: 'They're still lovely.'
Matt was behind her, leaning on the spade. 'Your hands are still beautiful.'
She tried to read his expression, then stood up and shook out the sack. 'How's the bathroom?' she asked, carefully neutral. 'You thought you'd be done by this week.'
'I don't want to talk about that,' Matt said. 'For weeks we've been skirting round each other. I want to talk about us.'
'There is no us, Matt,' Isabel said firmly, picking up her bucket.
'You can't say that.'
He moved closer to her and Isabel wondered if the children were close - or anyone else.
'I was there, Isabel,' his voice was low, intimate, 'and I felt how you were - how we were. What I said afterwards . . . it was a mistake, a misunderstanding. I haven't stopped thinking about it. About us.'
Isabel set off briskly towards the house. 'Please don't, Matt,' she said.
'I know what I felt, Isabel.'
She spun round. 'Perhaps it would be best if we settled up for the work you've done and left it there.'
'You need me here, Isabel. No one knows this house better th
an I do.'
'Maybe,' she said, into the wind, 'but I don't think this is doing either of us any good, do you? Let's just get the bathroom done and then . . .' She had reached the kitchen. 'I've got to go,' she said. She closed the door and stood against the other side of it.
'Isabel? What have I done to make you so angry? Why are you being like this?'
She hoped he wouldn't try the door.
'Isabel, I didn't mean what I said that night. It came out wrong.'
'I'm not going to discuss it,' she said.
A moment passed. Then she heard his voice again, close to the door, as if he had laid the side of his face against it. It was low, conspiratorial. 'You can't pretend nothing's changed,' he said.
She waited, hearing the weight of the silence outside, and then, as his footsteps eventually moved away, and finally disappeared, she let out a long sigh. She raised a hand to her face, one dirtied, soil-covered hand, almost unrecognisable even to herself. It was shaking.
Matt drove the short distance home alone. Byron, who had barely spoken to him all day, had disappeared before he'd finished, and Anthony had said that he'd like to stay with Kitty for a bit longer.
'Your mum's expecting you,' Matt said, envying the boy's freedom to stay in the house.
'No, she isn't. I told her I was staying here to watch a film. You don't listen.'
In other circumstances Matt would have slapped down such insubordination, but he was distracted by the sound of Isabel, apparently unconcerned by their exchange, tuning her violin upstairs. Listening to her play was uncomfortable for him now. It flashed images into his mind of that windy night, her gasping beneath him. He didn't understand what had just happened between them: he knew how she felt - why was she denying it?
He skidded into his drive and slammed the cab door bad-temperedly. Bernie hobbled out to meet him, but he brushed past the old dog, trying to quell his thoughts. No 'us', she had said. Like it had been a mistake.
He opened the oven and saw it was empty. 'Where's my dinner?' he yelled up the stairs.
There was no answer so he moved round the kitchen, lifting up plates and pans, trying to work out where she had put it.
'Where's my dinner?' he said again, as Laura appeared in the doorway.