For an instant he looked confused.
‘Oh, yeah. Go and have a look if you want.’
‘Aren’t you coming…?’
He shrugged and followed me up.
The door stuck a little as I pushed it open, breaking the seal of the fresh paint. I switched on the light and a bare forty-watt bulb illuminated a spartan space, empty except for two single beds and a cluster of unopened packing cases.
‘Singles?’ I turned to Nick with a bemused look.
‘I thought that’d be more practical,’ Nick said, evasively, ‘in case…’ He gave me a defensive glance.
‘In case Gabe wants to stay,’ I supplied. A pained look crossed Nick’s face.
I should not have sounded so grudging. Gabe was Nick’s son. The fact that he was pushing thirty and had just bought a flat of his own, courtesy of a whopping loan from his father should not, I supposed, preclude him from feeling welcome in our house. Surely Ethan should take priority though? It must surely still be his room, not ‘the boys’ room’ or ‘the spare room’. It would be hard enough persuading our disaffected young son back to this sleepy hamlet after his gap year, without making him feel like a guest. I don’t know what I had expected. Blue and white striped walls? A miniature basketball net? Ethan was nineteen now. A man. All the same, the emptiness, the sterility of the room could not have contrasted more starkly with the care Nick had lavished on the rest of the house.
I thought of Ethan’s old room in London. It had been a health hazard, the way teenage boys’ rooms often are – you went in holding your breath and hoped you could retrieve the five mouldering coffee mugs from under the bed before you had to gasp for air. It had accumulated grunge the way a bat cave accumulates guano, his interests over the years evidenced in layers, like relics in an archaeological dig, from Harry Potter to Stormzy, ammonites to condoms. But beneath the rank whiff of adolescence and the deliberate affronts to political correctness, I had always been able to detect the little boy he had been – not just in his football trophies or the dog-eared Pokemon cards at the back of a drawer, but in the clean, underlying tang of goodness.
‘Oh well,’ I said, coming out of my reverie, ‘if he gets himself a girlfriend, I suppose we can always push the beds together…’
I turned around to find Nick gone. How long had I been standing there? Two minutes? Ten? Had he left because I’d offended him or had he merely got bored of waiting? I felt a flutter of anxiety in my stomach. How graceless I’d been; how boorish to pick holes because the furniture wasn’t just so in every room. He’d gone to so much effort everywhere else; made such a beautiful job of it.
‘Nick?’ I called anxiously, hurrying down to the first-floor landing.
‘Better get a move on if you want some of this fizz,’ he called back, his tone friendly and relaxed.
‘Coming!’
I clattered down the last flight of stairs, relieved, chastened, grateful.
2
I rose up from sleep like a deep-sea diver. For a few seconds I had no idea where I was, and then I heard footsteps and the clink of crockery on the landing and I remembered. I kept my eyes closed until Nick had entered the room and set the tray down on the bedside table, I don’t know why. When I opened them, his face was an inch from mine, moving in for a kiss. I feinted to spare him my morning breath, and his lips landed on my cheek instead. His breath smelled faintly of garlic from last night’s meal and of his occasional tobacco habit and of Nick, which was the part that always slayed me. Perhaps mistaking my fastidiousness for lack of interest, however, he had already crossed to the window and raised the blind.
‘There you go,’ he said, turning to me proudly, ‘what do you reckon?’
I squinted into the sunshine, waiting for the dazzle of blue and green to resolve itself into a view. The hill was actually two hills, a greater and a lesser one, rising up from the land like the uneven breasts of a sleeping giantess. Bright green foliage covered the lower slopes, but the peaks protruded, nude and straw-coloured as if the effort of rising so high had sapped them of fecundity. Above, a single pillowy cloud hung in the turquoise sky as if on wires.
‘It’ll do,’ I said, turning to pick up my teacup.
‘Fuck off!’ Nick gave me an incredulous grin and I smiled back mischievously. For the first time since my arrival I felt connected to him. This was how it used to be – easy banter, insults even. The ruder we were to one another, the better things were between us. He had courted me in obscenities, but for months now he’d been treating me like his maiden aunt and for months I’d been feeling like her.
I threw off the duvet and went to stand beside him, slipping my hand warily around his waist. He slung his arm over my shoulder in comradely fashion and we contemplated the scene together.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, ‘I love it. Well. Done. You.’ I punctuated each word with a kiss, lingering on the last one as a pretext to inhale his scent.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said smugly, ‘it was a no brainer really.’
I hooked my thumb over the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, and pretended not to notice him tense up. He turned and nuzzled my shoulder and, taking this as permission, I threaded my fingertips after my thumb. It felt like vertigo now, my desire – I could barely breathe. With a more or less convincing growl of lust, Nick made a lazy grab for my breast and I gasped with surprise and then, as his touch became more sensual, with gratitude. Pride left me now, and need took over. I manoeuvred myself in front of him, spread my palms wide across the windowsill and tilted my buttocks up and back interrogatively, as if posing for the world’s least imaginative pornographer.
‘All right then,’ he muttered, his voice thick, at last, with lust.
I didn’t look round, but waited for the first frisson of pleasure as his hands shucked my nightdress up over my hips, then the unbearable hiatus as he readied himself, the anticipation seeming to stretch out until the precise moment when fear that he would do this thing was perfectly balanced against dread that he might not. And then he was in me and I could no longer look at the view, because he had one hand on the crown of my head, pushing it down, and the other on my waist, for purchase, and all the disorientation and humiliation of the past was briefly, joyfully obliterated in the disorientation and humiliation of the present. My forehead juddered against the glass and he withdrew, flopping down on the bed with a faint harrumph of satisfaction. I stayed standing – limbs a-tremble, skin aflame, everything above the waist alive and energized, everything below numb and remote, yet still retaining the memory of pleasure, as an amputated limb retains the memory of an itch.
I leaned my forearms on the windowsill and took in, once again, the view beyond. It had a calming, almost soporific effect – the blueness of the blue, the greenness of the green, the emptiness of the landscape. Except it wasn’t quite empty, I noticed now.
‘Hey. There’s someone on our hill!’
Nick peered after my accusing finger.
‘It’s not our hill,’ he said, laughing. ‘It’s a local beauty spot. People go up there all the time. I shouldn’t think he copped much of an eyeful, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
I squirmed. I don’t know what I’d thought – certainly not that we owned it, but perhaps that we might have privileged access. A foolish idea, come to think of it, so I tried to make a joke of it, tapping on the window and calling out in my best cut-glass accent, ‘I say, you there! Get orf our land!’
By coincidence, the hiker chose that moment to start heading down. Nick was delighted.
‘There you go. Breeding will out. You’re a natural. Rounding up the peasants, keeping down the foxes. I told you you’d take to country living.’
Foxes. Oh God. I felt again the slither of tyre on gravel, the dull thud, the dread and minutes later, as my hand skimmed the moulded plastic of the bumper, the certainty of what I had done. I thought of the poor beast’s stiffening carcass decaying somewhere under a hedge. I glanced down at my fingers, half expecting to
see blood on them.
A two-tone chime sounded downstairs, startling me. I stared at Nick and for a moment he stared back, equally flummoxed. Then his face cleared.
‘It’s the door. You’ll have to go.’ He nodded apologetically towards his still semi-erect penis.
‘Oh God!’ I grabbed my dressing gown, wiping my soiled fingers on a screwed-up tissue in the pocket as I hurried downstairs, desperately hoping it wasn’t a neighbour or anyone on whom I needed to make a good impression.
I needn’t have worried. A courier was peering impatiently through the mullioned windows of the front door. I opened it with an apologetic smile and he thrust a large square box into my arms and handed me an electronic pad to sign, almost taking my eye out with the stylus in his haste to get away. The package was light but bulky and addressed to Nick. I tried not to speculate. Let him have a life. Let him take delivery of a parcel without it being pawed and scrutinized by his mistrustful wife. But then I noticed the company logo.
I raced back up to the bedroom, and did a silly little jig.
‘I know what this i-is! It’s my thermocouple, isn’t it?’
‘Bloody hell!’ Nick muttered bitterly. ‘Three weeks they’ve had to deliver this and they pick the day after you arrive.’
‘I’d have thought that was when you’d want it to come…’
‘Well no, I was planning on having things ready for you, to surprise you.’
‘The kiln, you mean?’
‘Better than that. Come on, I might as well show you now.’
‘Show me what? What are you up to?’
He picked up the package in one hand and yanked me up off the bed with the other.
‘Where are we going?’
He galloped me down the stairs, only letting go of my hand when we reached the kitchen, so he could unlock the back door. He was still wearing pyjama bottoms and his feet were bare but he strode up the garden, past the pond and the vegetable patch – a man on a mission.
‘Nick!’ I hurried after him, half anxious, half excited. ‘What’s the big—’
But he had disappeared, squeezing through a gap in the yew hedge I hadn’t even known was there. With some trepidation I followed him and found myself in a hidden dell, surrounded on all sides by shrubbery. In one corner loomed what at first glance looked like a tree house: a timber structure with a shallow-pitched roof, all clean lines and Scandinavian simplicity. Three floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto a narrow veranda, which was raised on stilts to clear the steeply sloping ground in front, while the back nestled into a bower of mature shrubs. Timber steps led up from the scrubby lawn to a glass-panelled side door. It was utilitarian without being cold, rustic without being hokey. I knew Nick hadn’t built it himself – he could barely put up a shelf – and I doubted he had even had much of a hand in designing it, but he had gone out of his way to think about what I would like and found someone to make it, and that, well… that was a kind of miracle.
Speechless, grinning, I shook my head as I followed him up the steps and through the door, which slid open with a satisfying rumble. It was hot inside. Dust motes swirled in the light. There was a smell of timber and fresh paint and the sound of a bluebottle flinging itself stupidly against the glass.
‘So yeah, this is it,’ said Nick, with quiet pride. ‘Your studio.’
I stood beside him surveying the view down the garden and beyond to the valley, and slipped my hand into his.
‘You didn’t need to do this.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘Trying to get rid of me so you can have the house to yourself?’
There was a pause. The temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree or two. I’d meant it as a joke, but it was too soon; too near the knuckle.
‘That’s right,’ he said, stretching his lips into a grimace.
‘I’m kidding. I know why you did it and I’m touched, honestly I am. Nick, I absolutely love it.’
‘It’s the other view,’ he said briskly. ‘The one you don’t get from the bedroom. Or from the house at all, come to that. It faces south-east, so it gets the sun nearly all day.’
I glanced around the room and nodded my approval. He seemed to have thought of everything – my wheel and kiln were there of course; also a wedging table, a glazing area, a sink, metal shelves for work in progress. Only…
He saw the brief frown cloud my features.
‘What?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘What have I got wrong?’ he asked wearily. ‘I thought I’d got it all covered. If you knew what I spent to get the floor reinforced for that beast over there…’
He nodded towards my kiln, cold and inert without its thermocouple, but soon to be the beating heart of the enterprise.
‘I love it. Honestly, there isn’t a single thing I’d change.’
‘Oh, but there is.’
‘It’s trivial,’ I shook my head, ‘I’m sure there’s a solution.’
‘A solution to what?’ he smiled through his exasperation.
I could have kicked myself. I had done it again. He had spent a fortune, but more importantly, he had invested his time, taken advice, thought through my methods – thought of me. And I had rubbished it with a moment’s tactlessness.
‘It’s just…’ I pulled a rueful face, ‘… Well… it’s lovely that it’s a sun trap and I love all the light. Only, with the clay – it can dry out so easily. I could have done with a damp room or at least a bit of shade, or cool somehow. I’m sure we can think of something though…’
He walked over to the kiln and stood with his back to me, drumming his fingers on its surface. One two three four, one two three four. I hovered nearby, mortified.
‘I’m sorry, Nick.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘No, I’ve been… I’m such a…’
‘I just wanted to get it right. To make it right.’ His voice was tight.
‘You have… you are. Please, Nick, stop beating yourself up. It’s time to stop now.’
I went over and laid my cheek against his bare back. He didn’t move. His skin was cool and clammy. I wrapped my arms around him and held on, trying to warm him up.
3
‘Funky, or elegant? What do you reckon?’
I held up an Ikat print tunic in one hand and a grey linen dress in the other. Jude reclined further on the bed, the better to appraise both outfits from a suitable distance.
‘I’d go with that,’ she said, leaning forward and swatting the dress, ‘the other one looks a bit “eccentric potter”.’
‘Oh, cheers, Jude…’
‘No it’s nice, and everything, it’s just… I’m not being funny, Kaz, you’ve got to be careful living in a place like this.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, we had a little nose round the town on our way here – it’s very cute, but…’
I jutted my chin, defensively.
‘… Also, let’s face it, a bit Middle Earth.’
‘It isn’t actually,’ I said hotly. ‘That’s just the touristy bit. There’s quite a decent commercial gallery that you wouldn’t have seen because it’s tucked away. And there’s a craft beer place and an art trail twice a…’
‘Don’t take it so personally,’ interrupted Jude, laughing, ‘it’s just where you live. It doesn’t define you.’
I looked at Jude in her Agnès b. shirt and her expensive haircut and felt a faint twinge of… what? Not dislike, surely? One could not dislike one’s best friend, who has stuck by one through thick and thin, particularly thin. Irritation, then. Yes, Jude could be irritating. Dave too. They had made fun of the Aga, as I knew they would. Dave had started humming the theme tune to The Archers and talking about milk quotas in a funny accent. But then the four of us had gone on to enjoy an evening of drunken camaraderie. Dave had brought coke ‘for old time’s sake’ and everyone had done a line except me. I was tactfully discouraged. There was a lot of repartee about what Dave insisted on calling ‘th
e Auld Neighbourhood’, even though he’s not Irish and it was in Hackney. Mutual friends were shot down in flames for their hypocrisies and pretensions. I found myself wondering what kind of jokes Dave and Jude made about us behind our backs, although to be fair, we had not really been joke material of late. Not unless you had a very sick sense of humour, anyway. It was a fun evening all the same and for a couple of hours, in the glow of the fire and the embrace of the wine, and to the strains of a mellow soundtrack provided by Nick’s music app that told you if you liked that, you might also like this, I started to see how I might become a person again, a friend, a wife even.
But that had been last night and this was tonight and the grey linen dress looked try-hard with the wedge heels that Jude had suggested, yet frumpy when dressed down with Converse, so I had abandoned it in favour of a drapey sweater and jeans. It had been a warm day and the sky was still blue, but a bank of pinky-grey clouds was scudding up the valley on a brisk evening breeze. The fairy lights that Nick had rigged in the trees around my new studio were swinging alarmingly, and smoke was swirling from the barbecue like a malevolent genie released from its lamp.
Jude and I stood on the grass, arms hugging our bodies and sipping our wine, while further down the garden Nick was greeting some early arrivals, his tone jovial and not a little strained.
‘This reminds me of my sixth birthday party,’ I muttered in Jude’s ear. ‘My mum invited the whole class and I hid in my bedroom and refused to come down.’
‘Let’s not talk to them,’ Jude said. ‘Let’s just get wasted and dance on the patio.’
I gave her an anxious glance.
‘Relax,’ Jude patted me on the shoulder, ‘I’m kidding.’
Already, Nick was shepherding an elderly couple up the garden path towards us: the man, white-haired and slightly stooped, in a houndstooth jacket and slacks; the woman ruddy-faced and beady in a polyester two-piece.
‘Darling,’ Nick said (he never called me darling), ‘these are our next-door-but-one neighbours, Jean and Gordon from Prospect Cottage. Jean, Gordon; meet my wife Karen and our very good friend Jude.’
The Move Page 2