He’s sitting down facing her now, his chin in his hands, smiling at her. His face turns out to be quite lined. This is a real grown-up.
“How old are you?”
Oh God, did I say that out loud? That’s so embarrassing.
“About to be forty,” he says, not seeming to mind. “Coming into my prime. If only.”
“That’s nothing,” says Maggie. “I’m thirty, and I feel as if my life’s practically over.”
She can’t believe the way she’s talking. Here she is, a professional, on a visit to a married man, and she’s giving him teaser lines as if this is a chat-up in a club.
“Actually,” he says, “there’s a film of mine being shot not far from here, over by the Seven Sisters. Only it turns out that without telling me they’ve brought in a new writer to change everything I’ve written.”
Maggie opens her eyes very wide.
“Are they allowed to do that?”
“They can do what the hell they want.”
He’s hurt, and he’s letting her see it. She wants to put her arms round him and make the hurt go away.
A car pulls up outside. He goes on looking at her, feeling her sympathy. Then the door opens and someone comes in.
“Jesus Christ! I have had it with my bloody mother!”
A woman with a hard, handsome face and unkempt hair throws her bag down on the kitchen table. Maggie stands up, puts out her hand.
“Maggie Dutton. Conservation Officer.”
“Oh, shit! Is it today? Hell and damnation.”
She looks almost frantic, moving about, eyes jumping. She goes to a calendar pinned above the fridge.
“Yes, you’re right. Ten a.m. How did I miss that?”
But her mind is elsewhere.
“I stopped off to see Mum after I dropped Cas off. She won’t have Bridget back. It’s driving me insane.” To Maggie, “Sorry. Batty old mother problems.”
“That’s okay,” says Maggie. “I’ve got all I need now. I should be getting on.”
The sight of Alan’s wife has shocked her back into reality. This man is married. He is not available. What have I been thinking of?
“She’ll come round,” he’s saying, his voice soothing his wife. “Give it time.”
“Alan, she can’t look after herself.”
Then seeing Maggie is on the way out, she turns her attention on her, as if taking her in properly for the first time.
“So what happens next? How long will it take?”
“I’m afraid you may have to reconsider,” says Maggie. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to recommend the plans as they stand.”
This is met by a shocked silence.
“It would alter the character of the building.”
“Of course it would alter the character of the building. We’re not putting hay wagons in it any more. We’re turning it into a work space.”
“I do understand.” Maggie is on familiar ground here, though it’s never comfortable. “But in the case of listed buildings we try our best to preserve the original character and appearance.”
“So what are we supposed to do with it?”
The wife is getting angry now; or finding an outlet for anger that was already there.
“I don’t see that it’s such a big deal,” says Alan.
She rounds on him in fury.
“Not such a big deal? It’s taken us four months to get this far! How much longer do we have to wait?” Then to Maggie, “This is our property. Don’t we have a right to live in it as we please?”
“Within the regulations governing listed buildings,” says Maggie, falling back on her stock of official answers.
“So what are we supposed to do? Milk cows there? This is all nonsense! This isn’t a farm any more. We’re not farmers. Why do we have to pretend nothing’s changed? Who are these rules for? Is it so the walkers can come down the lane and say, Oh look, isn’t that pretty? This isn’t a museum, for God’s sake!”
“I’m sorry,” says Maggie. “You always have the right to appeal. Now I really must go.”
She beats a hasty retreat, as she has done so often before. Back in her car, heading up the narrow lane, she forgets the anger of the wife and remembers the wry smile on the face of the husband. She caught his eye a couple of times, and she’s sure she saw complicity there. And what if she did? What happens next? Nothing. He’s not about to leave his wife.
Not as far as I know.
The encounter leaves her in total disarray. She’s ashamed of herself, conscious of having behaved badly, but no real harm has been done. No words were spoken that make her blush in retrospect. It was all a matter of looks. And yet she’s quite certain that he understood her and she understood him. How extraordinary it is, this discovery of mutual attraction. Two total strangers know within seconds that they have recognized something in each other; like travelers in faraway lands who can tell a fellow countryman by the way he turns his head, by the shape of his smile.
I could be wrong, of course. The less you know about someone, the more they fill up the waiting space in your dreams. Maybe this flash of excitement is just the effect of novelty, and what’s new becomes old quite quickly. Maybe that’s how other people do it. They make their commitments fast, before the novelty wears off.
It was all so different with Andrew. We were friends before we were lovers. Hard to pinpoint, looking back, the exact moment at which we became a couple. People think the first time you sleep together is the watershed moment, but you can have sex and not become a couple, we’ve all done it. Some other process is at work that pulls you together, some recognition that you fill the gaps in each other’s lives. You start seeing more of each other, you come to depend on the other person being there, and little by little your lives become intertwined. No moment of decision, and yet a decision of sorts is reached. From that point on your route is set, and it takes an act of will to diverge from it. Or an outside force.
24
Liz has just driven ten miles to take Cas to a friend’s house in Folkington, which turned out to have electric gates and servants’ quarters, for God’s sake, and handed Cas over to a nanny who clearly thought she too was a nanny, and then all the way back to her mother’s house, who she hoped had got some sense into her overnight but instead turned out to be expecting an apology from her, which not being forthcoming led to another nasty row, and she comes home to find this! Some dolly from the council simpering at Alan and telling him he can’t have his office and Alan lies there like a dog with his paws in the air having his tummy tickled.
“Why didn’t you tell her to piss off? Who does she think she is? I should bloody well think we will appeal! What is this British obsession with the past? No wonder we’re no good at making things any more. We’re so busy pretending it’s still Rule, Britannia! and the empire on which the sun never sets.”
“I suppose there has to be some kind of limit,” says Alan, attempting to be reasonable at a time when reason is not called for.
“You were a big lot of use,” says Liz. “You let her walk all over you.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Stand up for yourself. Argue back. Who the hell is she anyway? Why is her opinion more important than ours?”
“Well, that’s her job. To protect old buildings.”
“Whose side are you on here, Alan?”
“It’s not about sides. There are regulations, that’s all.”
“You know she was flirting with you?”
“Oh, come on.”
“You really don’t know? Jesus, Alan! Wake up!”
“Why on earth would she flirt with me?”
“I don’t know. People do. She was quite pretty. Or didn’t you notice?”
“To be honest I’ve got other things on my mind.”
“Well, you can kiss goodbye to your office. Little Miss Flirty’s going to put a stop to that.”
“I can live with that.”
“Oh, sure. But what about me
? I have to go on working in a cupboard.”
“Then you take the parlor. I’ll have the cupboard.”
“Jesus!”
It comes out as a shout of frustration. At Alan. At life.
“I honestly don’t know what else to say, Liz.”
“Anything! Say anything! Why do you have to accept everything? Why don’t you ever fight for what you want? Why does it always have to be me? I’m tired of fighting.”
“Then maybe you should stop.”
“And join you in the victims’ club?”
“I’m not a victim,” he says. “Don’t say that.”
She’s beginning to get him angry too, and realizes this is what she wants.
“Have you called your producer?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Why not? You’re just going to take it, aren’t you? They fuck you around, they bring in another writer without even telling you, and you just sit there and take it.”
“I have no choice!” Now he’s shouting. “Life isn’t a newspaper column, Liz. You can’t make all the bad stuff go away by complaining to the Daily Telegraph. Get some dignity, for Christ’s sake!”
“Dignity? What’s that? Letting everyone roll over you?”
“It’s not having tantrums when you don’t get your own way, like a spoiled four-year-old.”
“You think this is a tantrum? This is not a fucking tantrum! This is fury! This is the real thing, believe me. I am sick and tired of all this self-destructive misery. I’m drowning in it. There’s my bloody mother poisoning herself with hatred for anyone who tries to help her. There’s you letting yourself get shat on because you’re so bloody sodden with self-pity. There’s this house which we bought to be a place where we could both work and neither of us can do a fucking thing. Jesus, why do I bother?”
She goes out of the room and stamps upstairs. Alan stays in the kitchen, looking out of the window at the sunshine on the yard wall. Then he follows her.
She’s lying on their bed, crying. Just low snuffly crying, nothing too violent. He sits on the edge of the bed beside her and speaks in a steady reasonable voice.
“I spoke to Robert at the agency about this new writer. He says there’s nothing I can do. I’ve asked Jane to send me the new draft. If I really hate what they’ve done I can take my name off it. That’s as far as I can go.”
Liz snuffles a bit more and dabs at her eyes but says nothing.
“You’re right about the self-pity. I do feel sorry for myself right now. But it’ll pass.”
So everything’s all right, his voice says. No need to cry about it.
“About your mother. She won’t have a carer because she can’t bear to think she’s old. So leave her alone. Let her get there in her own time. That’s not a cruel or neglectful thing to do. It’s respecting her. Let her be the one to say to you, I need help. Then she’ll accept it.”
“She’ll fall over. She’ll break something.”
“Yes, she may. But let it happen. You can’t save her from the consequences of being old.”
“I could if I had her to live with us.”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“It might.”
She wants him to tell her no, he’ll leave her if she brings her mother to live with them. She wants him to say it would make their life a nightmare. Anything to take away some of the responsibility that’s squeezing the life out of her.
“It would drive you insane, Liz. You know it would.”
“I can’t just leave her to rot.”
“It’s her life.”
There’s a simple brutality to his view which shocks Liz. He sees the issue as practical, almost mechanical, leaving out the surrounding swamp of duty, love, guilt, anger, memory.
She dries her eyes and sits up. He stands.
She says, not looking at him, “What are we going to do about this planning permission?”
“Wait and see. We don’t know anything official yet.”
“Do nothing, you mean.”
He doesn’t respond to that. Following her up here to their bedroom, finding her crying on the bed, that was meant to be the prelude to a reconciliation. Only it isn’t happening.
“Had she been here long?”
“No. Not long at all.”
“She looked very cozy in the kitchen, with her mug of coffee.”
“It seemed the polite thing to do.”
“Polite.” Liz gets up, straightens the bedcover. “Yes. You did look polite.”
“This is stupid, Liz.”
“What’s stupid?” Then, changing tack, “Yes, I am stupid.”
“There’s no need to make problems where none exist.”
“No. It’s stupid.”
She walks past him and down the stairs.
What else can she do? If he doesn’t understand what it is that upsets her she can’t make him understand. Not without humiliating herself. And anyway, he’s right. This is all stupid. All he needs to say to her is, What do I want with some other woman when I’ve got you? He doesn’t say it because he thinks it doesn’t need saying, but it does, it does.
She’s younger than me, and prettier, and she was coming on to you, Alan, really she was, I’m not making it up. Why wouldn’t I be just a little bit threatened? People are stupid sometimes. And they hurt each other, and are too proud to say sorry, and then everything goes silent and unhappy.
Jesus, I’m so tired of people being unhappy.
25
After lunch the sun comes out once more and floods the garden with its brittle light. Carrie has never been a sun-baby. She feels more at home in autumn, in the long shadows of evening. Now she sits on the terrace watching Toby, who stands on the lawn by her father’s side, in their turn watching Terry run his dog through the orchard.
Terry himself is mostly invisible. They hear his sharp cries to his dog. “Yip, yip! Over here, Nipper! Back up! Back up!” The small dog bursts out from between trees, racing up and down the orchard, nose eagerly to the ground, and vanishes again into the long grass.
Carrie can hear her father talking to Toby about rabbits.
“It’s the weed syndrome,” he says. “Call a plant a weed and you give yourself permission to uproot it and burn it. Do that to a rose bush and you’re a murderer. Same with rabbits. Over the hedge there, in the meadow, it’s all Flopsy and Mopsy and we love them. But that same rabbit, as soon as he enters my garden, he becomes my enemy and I will destroy him.”
“Have you ever actually killed one?” says Toby.
“Just the once. Shot it with an air rifle.”
“Did that give you a good feeling?”
“Fantastic!”
Carrie expects Toby to challenge this grotesque response, but he just nods and smiles. Clearly her father was expecting a bit more kickback too. Maybe he wants it.
“I’d have thought you’d be rather against killing things,” he says.
“Why’s that?”
“Well, you don’t strike me as the aggressive type.”
“I don’t know if I’m aggressive or not. But if you kill other creatures, it’s like you’re saying what you want is more important than what they want. And I do think that. I think what I want is more important than anything else in the world.”
“I suspect everyone secretly thinks that,” says her father. “And I sure as hell think that what I want is more important than what some rabbit wants.”
“The rabbit thinks the same way,” says Toby. “Only the other way round.”
“You think there’s no difference between the rabbit and me?”
“Oh, yes, there’s a difference,” says Toby. “You’re the one with the gun.”
Her father laughs at that. Terry’s dog reappears, moving more slowly now, no longer nosing the grass.
Carrie resents her father for standing on the lawn talking and laughing with Toby. She resents Toby for paying her no attention. This stupid talk of killing rabbits embarrasses her. Who do they think they are? Big
game hunters? It’s beginning to look as if Toby’s avoiding being alone with her, and this makes her feel entirely crazy inside. She asked him to go with her for driving practice and he said he would but now he won’t say when. Maybe she’s imagining it but it’s like he doesn’t look her in the eyes properly any more.
Terry now appears from the trees and his dog runs to his side.
“All clear,” he says. “I’ll lay my life there’s no rabbits in the garden right now.”
“And they can’t climb the fence any more?”
“No way. Squirrels, yes. Your squirrel can hang upside down. But not your rabbit.”
Carrie expects Toby to join her now the rabbit hunt is over, but he stays with the two men, discussing the habits of rodents as if he’s been an estate owner all his life. When he starts asking about the dog, and if it can outrun a rabbit, she can stand it no more. She gets up from her chair, pushes it back over the brick paving so that it makes a scraping sound. Toby does not look round. She goes into the kitchen. Her mother is making a loud noise mixing ingredients in the Magimix. When the noise stops she says to Carrie, “You haven’t told me if you’re in or not on Saturday evening, so I’m assuming you’re not.”
“Okay,” says Carrie.
“That means you’ll have to go out to a pub or something. I can’t have you cluttering up the kitchen making yourself a private meal.”
“We may go out. We may not.”
“No, Carrie. I’m sorry. You’re going out. You won’t decide, so I’ve decided for you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mum. Stop trying to freeze the future.”
This is one of Toby’s lines, as they both know. Carrie’s frustration is with Toby, not her mother. She has no idea whether he’ll still be staying with them by Saturday. If he is, she thinks it very unlikely he’ll want to join the planned dinner party.
“I’m just telling you now,” says her mother.
“Fine. Whatever.”
It’s all gone wrong. The sparky exciting unpredictable tone that Toby brought to the house has soured. Carrie knows she spends all her time watching him, her eyes reproaching him for his lack of attention to her. She knows this is exactly the wrong strategy. But she can’t help herself.