Under the ruthless new ownership, however, Prudence feared for him. Their new MD, Alan, had a more hands-on approach than his predecessor. He liked to know what everybody was up to. He involved himself in every detail down to the consumption of petrol in his staff’s company cars. He summoned them to meetings – Prudence and Stephen had one that afternoon – where he watched them shrewdly through a veil of cigarette smoke and asked them to update him on their projects.
Prudence was thinking about this when she left the office for lunch. She was also remembering the last time she and Stephen had made love – a snatched hour in her flat ten days earlier. It was almost impossible for him to get away in the evening without arousing suspicion. Most of their lovemaking consisted of fumbles in doorways or in his car, with the windows steaming up as if the two of them were teenagers. Except teenagers seemed to be at it all the time. ‘What we’ve got is sex-free adultery,’ she had complained to him, the week before. ‘Like alcohol-free lager.’
She was remembering his tongue nuzzling her pubic hair when she stepped onto the pavement. The gardener’s van was still there. She gazed at it fondly, for it was imprinted with her erotic memories. The gardener leaned against it, eating a samosa. Prudence smiled at her. She hadn’t seen this one before. She was just about to cross the road when the woman said: ‘Hey, are you an editor?’
Prudence stopped. ‘How can you tell?’
‘You look like one.’
Prudence was silent. She didn’t know how to take this.
‘Wait a moment.’ The woman was tall and striking; a jewel winked in her nostril. Her hair was bundled up in an ethnic turban. She swallowed the last mouthful of samosa, wiped her hands and reached inside the van. She took out a mud-streaked folder and shoved it in Prudence’s hand. ‘Will you read this?’ It was more a command than a question.
‘What is it?’
‘My novel.’
‘Goodness.’ It was heavy. Four hundred pages at least. ‘I’m non-fiction.’
The woman laughed shortly. ‘We’re all non-fiction, aren’t we. If you think about it.’
‘I mean –’
‘My address is on the inside.’
The woman strode off. She got into the van, slammed shut the door and started the engine.
It was called The Birches, the house in Purley. There was a birch wood at the end of the garden. Silver birches, they reminded Dorothy of her eldest daughter Louise – slender, graceful, bending to the will of the wind. The wood was thin, however; just a belt of trees. Beyond it was the local comprehensive, a series of ugly modern buildings that were revealed each autumn when the leaves fell. Raucous shouts rang out at lunchtime. The pupils climbed into the wood and left behind a litter of sweet wrappers and worse. Depending on the season, the wood seemed either like a barrier sealing her home safe from the outside world or a sieve that let it all in. Whether this disturbed Dorothy varied according to her mood. Sometimes she welcomed the yells and laughter; they seemed the only sign of life in the hushed, respectable neighbourhood. Even with the windows closed she could hear them; they cheered her when she stood in the empty house.
There was no one moment, of course, when her daughters had left home. It had happened gradually. For years they had left their things in their rooms; it had taken a long time for them to depart entirely. But they were gone now, they had been gone for almost two decades, and the house seemed huge without them. The bedrooms had reverted to just being bedrooms. Sometimes relatives came to stay. Sometimes even the grandchildren came to stay. But it was no longer a family home; it was a large house, with Gordon and herself rattling around in it. Now and then she grew restless. She told her husband that they must move somewhere smaller and more suitable but he wanted to stay put.
Besides, they were too busy. At this moment, for instance, Gordon had seven jobs on, one of them the refurbishment of ten thousand feet of commercial premises down by the Elephant and Castle. In addition to this he had constant calls from his regular customers – maintenance, emergency repairs. He was up at six, out of the house by seven. Like all builders his own home remained full of half-completed tasks. When the girls were small it had taken him four years to put in a proper kitchen; she had had to nag him to get it done and finally threatened to walk out. He hadn’t taken her seriously, he never took her seriously. And she hadn’t walked out, had she? She was still here.
It was lunchtime on Monday. Dorothy sat in the office extension. One window overlooked the front yard; the other overlooked the garden. She was typing up the estimate for a new job. In the front yard, two of the lads were loading panels of Gyproc onto the van. Gordon breezed in.
‘Got the Selwood Avenue invoice, love?’
She gave it to him. ‘I’ve left off the VAT.’
‘Thanks, pet.’ He pocketed it.
She put on the kettle. ‘She seemed very quiet yesterday.’
‘Who did?’
‘Prudence.’
‘She’s a quiet girl.’
‘Shouldn’t call them girls.’
‘They are, to me.’ He lit a cigarette.
She fetched two tea-bags. ‘How do you think Maddy looked?’
The phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Kendal Contractors . . .’
She looked out of the window. At the end of the garden, on an old stretch of hard standing that had once been a garage, sat the caravan. It had been parked there for years, quietly rotting.
‘. . . in the woodwork, you said?’ Gordon was talking on the phone. ‘Well, rot’s a fungal infection, give it a sniff . . .’
Through the woods, the schoolchildren shouted. They echoed through the years. If she narrowed her eyes she could see her daughters playing in the caravan, playing houses.
‘. . . it gives off, well, a fungal-type smell . . . slide in a knife and see if it gives . . . I’ll send one of the lads around tomorrow . . .’
She remembered their holidays, parked in the sand dunes near Hythe. Maddy was shouting, she could hear her. Why was Maddy always angry? Nothing Dorothy said could comfort her.
Gordon put down the phone. ‘I’m off.’
‘Gordon! There’s a sandwich here.’
But he had gone. All that was left was a cigarette, smouldering in the ashtray. He never stubbed them out properly.
Through the trees the school bell rang. The voices ceased. In the front yard, the lads drove away. Dorothy sat there in silence. Yesterday, for the first time in years, she had seen all three of her daughters together. It had been a curious sensation. Oh, it was lovely, of course, that Maddy was home and that they had all gathered together, briefly, as a family. But it had been painful too. The undercurrents had risen to the surface, nothing had changed. Maddy contradicting her father; Gordon rising to the bait. Prudence the peacemaker looking diminished, as she always did in her sister’s house. And yet, at the same time, her daughters seemed like strangers. By seeing them together, she realised how unknowable their lives had become – even Louise, to whom she felt the most close, with whom she had domestic life and the grandchildren in common. Her own role as a mother was long since over. Her role as a grandmother was almost over too; Imogen and Jamie no longer needed her.
Dorothy sat there with her pile of invoices. Was this all there was to it? You raised children, you made a home, you kept the business ticking over. And in the end you were left alone with a husband who fidgeted to be somewhere else.
Dorothy was not a rebellious person. She had been brought up by strict parents. Her father had run a haulage company, her mother had raised a family. Dorothy herself had followed in her mother’s footsteps; she had just accumulated more money on the way. Suddenly she envied her daughters their freedom. Even their unhappiness seemed an adventure, a voyage into uncharted waters. Her grandchildren were growing up in a world that was largely incomprehensible to her. She had sat here in this suburban street; over the past years her main contact with the outside world had been the lads, her surrogate children, jostling into her office on payda
y and bringing tales of treacherous girlfriends and custody battles.
She gazed at the caravan – curtained windows, shabby cream bodywork. What a symbol of freedom it had once seemed! All of a sudden she had an impulse to hitch it to the car and drive away – anywhere, anywhere but here. Chester. Aberystwyth. Somewhere she could see before it was too late. Drive off to a new life and see if anyone noticed.
She didn’t, of course. Instead, wrinkling her nose, she stubbed out Gordon’s Marlboro. She thought that in all their years of marriage, her husband had never asked if she minded the smell of his cigarette smoke.
‘The thing about adultery,’ said Prudence, ‘is that you have to snatch your moment and it’s always the wrong time of day. Like two in the afternoon, sitting in a freezing car. Or a quick grapple in the photocopying room at half past nine in the morning. The person they’re living with gets all the good times – the evenings, the nights, oh, the nights . . . the sunny Sundays in the park. As if they don’t have enough of them anyway. Seems so greedy of them.’
‘Give him up then,’ said Maddy. ‘Seems stupid to me.’
Prudence sighed. If only it were so simple. It was Wednesday evening. They were sitting in the basement flat in Tufnell Park, the place that had been lent to Maddy, eating takeaway pizza.
‘Ditch him and find somebody else,’ said Maddy.
‘You don’t understand.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘If you were in my position –’
‘I wouldn’t get into your position,’ said Maddy.
‘No. Everything’s black and white to you, isn’t it.’ Prudence looked around. ‘Aren’t you going to unpack? It looks awful. Shall I help?’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Well, to make it look nice for yourself.’
‘But I don’t mind.’
‘There must be some other reason,’ said Prudence.
‘What reason?’
‘You can never find things.’
‘But if I don’t need them I never look for them anyway.’
Pru gave up. She looked out of the window. From this subterranean viewpoint only a strip of the street was visible – the pavement, the wheels of parked cars. Somewhere, children shouted.
‘I always feel like this when I’ve been to Lou’s and Robert’s,’ she said. ‘Do you?’
‘Feel what?’
‘Like this.’ Suddenly she yelled. ‘Men!’
Maddy closed the pizza box. ‘In the village I lived in, all the woman had clitoridectomies.’
Prudence gazed at her sister. She got up and paced around the room. ‘I’m going to ring him up. Now. He’ll just be putting the boys to bed, having quality time with them, His horrible wife’ll be cooking supper, lamps lit, gin and tonic waiting. I’m going to phone him up and blow the whole thing apart.’
‘Don’t be daft. Course you won’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m your sister,’ said Maddy.
Prudence smiled. How quickly they had slipped back into their old relationship. She admired Maddy – she was simple and direct, there was something morally upstanding about her. But she also irritated Prudence. Despite her adventures in foreign countries, despite her physical bravery, she was so untested.
Prudence made her way past the slumped plastic bags belonging to the owner of the flat, past the detritus of someone else’s life amongst which Maddy seemed content to live. She went into the kitchen. A batik hanging failed to cover a damp patch on the wall. She looked through the window. Even in the dark she could see that the garden was a mess. She thought, irritably, that if she had this place she would make it nice. She had always wanted a garden. ‘You should do something about it out here,’ she called, searching for some coffee. She could only find a jar of Nescafé. Prudence, who liked real coffee, suddenly felt lonely. She longed for Stephen so much that her legs felt weak. She loved her sister, but in matters of the heart Maddy was no use at all.
Prudence drove home. She wondered what Stephen was doing now. In fact, from the clues she had gathered about his wife, Kaatya wasn’t the sort of person to fix him a gin and tonic. Prudence had said this to Maddy because her sister made her speak in clichés, she didn’t encourage subtlety. From what Prudence had heard over the past months, clues she had picked at like a scab, Kaatya was a neurotic, self-absorbed person who didn’t look after Stephen at all. She was always going off on courses, leaving Stephen to cope with the boys and do the cooking. She was restless and impulsive. ‘Now she wants to live in Normandy,’ he had sighed one day, making Prudence’s heart lurch. Kaatya was moody, sinking into glooms that made her family creep around the house speaking in whispers. The next day she would suddenly dig up the garden to lay a patio. ‘I never know what’s going to hit me when I get home,’ said Stephen, running his hand through his hair. Kaatya seemed to keep the three males of her household in a constant state of wary anxiety. They sounded bemused by her wilful femaleness. Prudence thought she sounded a pain.
Back in the flat Prudence made herself a pot of real coffee, freshly ground, and switched on the gas-coal fire. How cosy her living room looked. She would make him a gin and tonic. She looked at the manuscripts she had brought home. She ought to read a treatise on environmentally sustainable industries but suddenly she wasn’t interested.
She lifted up the top folder. Rubbing off the mud with her finger, she read the title: Playing with Fire by Erin Fox. She should have given it to Liz, who dealt with novels, but something about the gardening woman had intrigued her. ‘We’re all non-fiction, if you think about it.’ Prudence thought: if only we weren’t. If we were fiction I could rewrite Stephen and make him leave his wife. I could create a man to fall in love with Kaatya and the boys would like him even though they still loved their father and we could all live happily ever after.
Prudence set her gold-rimmed cup and saucer precisely in the middle of the table. The cat jumped into her lap. She withdrew the manuscript from the folder and opened it at page one.
Three
THE GENERAL STORES in Wingham Wallace was an old brick cottage with living accommodation above. It faced the village green. Years before, there had been a butcher’s shop next door, and a hardware shop up the road towards the church. The older residents could even remember the days when there had been a ladies’ outfitters called Meryl Modes in a building that had since been flattened to create the pub car-park. These shops had long since gone. They had been reabsorbed into the cottages, leaving no trace except enlarged ground floor windows – in one case, regrettably glazed with bottle-glass. The hardware store was now the weekend retreat of a City solicitor whose intruder lights froze the local courting couples in its beam. This was just another irritant for the villagers who had seen their shops disappear and public transport reduced to two buses a day.
Now, only the General Stores remained. In summer it did a brisk trade in ice-cream but the rest of the year it struggled to survive, relying on the elderly locals collecting their pensions and the other villagers dropping in for things they had forgotten to buy at Tesco. The owners, Tim and Margot Minchin, had moved in five years earlier. Their lives had already been bedevilled by bad luck. This was another blow, for the superstore was erected only ten minutes’ drive away, between the village and Beaconsfield. Once it was built even their most loyal customers deserted them, seduced by the miles of aisles crammed with everything anyone could need, and a lot else. How could Tim’s wizened bananas compete? It was a vicious circle, for the less business he did the less cash he had to invest in stock, so the shelves emptied and the shop began to have a third-world look. That spring there had been yet another blow. Tesco had introduced a free bus service which lured away his last remaining customers, those too poverty-stricken or dilapidated to run their own car. And on top of it all he had to cope with Margot.
Tim was a small, weedy man. Margot was huge. Since their tragedy six years earlier, a tragedy of which they never spoke, Margot had put on an alarmin
g amount of weight. They never spoke of this too – what could you say? Tim blamed the various pills she had been prescribed at the time – anti-depressants, Prozac – upon which she had grown more and more dependent. He knew that she ate too much – comforting, sweet things like cake and chocolates – but he had no idea of the extent of her addiction for she spent increasing amounts of time upstairs, leaving him to run the shop. Over the past year she had retreated from the world. To his customers she had become creaking footsteps across the ceiling and the murmur of daytime TV. He had long ago given up talking to her about the problems with the business, she became so upset. ‘What are we going to do?’ she would wail, tears sliding down her cheeks and settling into the creases in her neck.
Tim was a gallant man. To him, women were to be worshipped, as he had worshipped his mother. They were to be protected. When he was a boy he had made swords out of planks of wood and pretended to be a crusading knight, rescuing damsels in distress. Nowadays his favourite recreation was to take part in Civil War re-enactments, fighting for the Royalist cause. Once he had worshipped his wife. In those days she’d been a big, fruity woman with a ringing laugh. When they’d made love he had marvelled at the ripeness of her body; he had sobbed with gratitude, burying his face between her breasts. That was long ago, however. Nowadays he simply kept her safe, shielding her from the nudging giggles of schoolchildren and the financial problems of the shop that had once been their dream. And his need to worship at the temple of womanhood – that need, so powerful within him – was channelled elsewhere.
On Friday he was slotting copies of the local newspaper into the rack. He always remembered, later, what he was doing when she came into the shop. The door opened; the sunlight dazzled him. She greeted him and picked up a basket.
Today her hair was piled on top of her head. It gave out a golden glow, like a halo. She raised her eyebrows and paused, as if trying to remember what she had come in for. She always did this. She inserted her finger into her nostril – not picking it, she wouldn’t do that. Thoughtfully exploring it. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt saying The London Marathon. Her husband ran in it each year; he was that sort of competitive creep. He didn’t deserve her little toe.