by Fiona Mozley
They hug. It’s a proper hug, the kind where you feel the warmth of the other person’s body.
Glenda goes inside the house, ducking her head though it in no way reaches the lintel. She turns and waves, then shuts the door behind her. Bastian sees a light being turned on in the hall.
Bastian makes his way back to the station and searches for a train that will take him to where he needs to go. He buys a cup of tea at the AMT stand. There’s a lot of waiting around. A lot of time to think. He sits on a bench and wraps his hands around the hot paper cup until it begins to scald.
He is making his way to Laura’s house.
He doesn’t want to just turn up, so he sits at the station and composes a message to her. He will let her know that he’s in the area, and ask if he can come and see her. If she’s free. If she wants to.
He’ll go over to Wakefield and sit and read his book, he’ll have a coffee. He might go to the Hepworth Gallery. An exhibition currently on there was advertised to him on his phone that morning. It is a combination of sculpture and sound installations, which ties in with Bastian’s interests in jazz and hi-fi equipment. And if Laura gets back to him, he’ll go over and have a proper chat.
The brief time Bastian and Laura spent together ended abruptly. The abrupt ending was prompted by a conversation about how Laura funded her studies. Although Laura’s mother was unable to work, Laura received no college bursary for complex reasons involving a wage-earning but absent father, and the length of time for which her mum had been off work. Her fees were covered by her loan and her loan also made some provision for maintenance costs, but it did not cover all her expenses. Having a regular job during term time was forbidden, as the university felt that having a job would detract from study. Laura found work in the holidays, but in these months her half-brothers were also off school and it made more sense for the family financially if Laura helped out with the childcare.
Laura mentioned to Bastian in passing that she had a profile on a website called Oxbridge Escorts, and that she had been paid to go on dates with rich men. Bastian was horrified.
They were sitting in Bastian’s college room with the windows wide open. Bastian’s room overlooked the river and the splashes from punts and shouts from punters rose with the midday heat. It was a lazy morning of coffee and sex. Bastian then went out for a couple of croissants and more coffee. There was a kettle and cafetière on the desk in his rooms, but Laura said she wanted froth, so Bastian walked out of the college, through its neo-Gothic gatehouse and across a wide street to a coffee shop where baristas created the appropriate froth with jugs of hot milk and a nozzle that spouted steam.
Bastian carried two cappuccinos in one hand and a brown bag containing two croissants in the other. The butter leaked from the pastry and made little greasy windows in the paper. As he walked back through the college he felt happy, possibly happier that he had felt in years. Happier than he has felt ever.
Laura was sitting naked on the bed. She was always easy with her body. She did not worry about her naked body being seen, either by Bastian or being accidentally glimpsed through the window if the light cut the right way and the curtain slipped, or if she leaned against the windowsill to pick up her phone or a glass of water. She didn’t mind taking up space. She would happily sprawl across a sofa or a double bed with her arms stretched wide and her legs apart. Bastian was intrigued by how comfortable she seemed in her body and how comfortable she made herself in the available space.
Laura’s laptop was open in front of her. The Oxbridge Escort profile page was up on the screen. Bastian asked her what it was and she explained.
“Like, as in an escort escort?”
“As in an escort escort.”
“So you go on dates with men for money?”
Laura shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Bastian.
“Then don’t say anything,” said Laura. “Look, I’m only on the website now because I’m deleting my profile.”
“But you’ve been doing it before? If you’re deleting it now, then. What? How long have you been doing it?”
“A couple of years on and off.”
“I—what? I don’t know what to say.”
“So you keep saying.”
“Well, how did you think I’d respond?”
“I didn’t think you’d find out. You came back sooner than I was expecting. When you got back I didn’t want to—I don’t know—slam my laptop shut or anything weird like that. It’s just, something I do. Did. Have done. It’s no big deal.”
Bastian was still holding the coffees and the brown paper bag. Laura reached out for her drink, and Bastian handed it over automatically. She was now sitting up on the bed with her legs crossed. She had pulled the duvet up around her and she held the coffee cup between both hands. She pulled off the plastic lid and brought it up to her mouth to lick off the milky foam.
“Look, it is what it is. It’s something I did for a couple of years, and may do again in the future, but I don’t want to do it at the moment because, well, call me old-fashioned but I don’t want to go on dates with other men right now.”
“There is nothing old-fashioned about this.”
“Actually, it’s the most old-fashioned profession in the world.”
“Wait a second. You mean, you did actually sleep with them? It wasn’t just dates. You are actually a prostitute? Great. That’s great.”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Laura got up. She started moving round the room, pulling her things together. She found a pair of knickers on the floor and put them on. She pulled her bra over her head, then the slip-on dress she’d been wearing the night before. She found her wash bag and started to stuff it inside her rucksack. Bastian was too shocked to stop her, or to say much else. He paced around the room a bit, he tried to drink some of his coffee but by that point it was cold.
She kept shaking her head and calling him a prick. She had gone red and wasn’t meeting his eye. She left and he was too stunned to do anything about it.
Service Station
Agatha sits in the back seat of the Rolls Royce with Fedor the borzoi, his long head resting on her lap. She draws her hands through his fur, teasing out knots with her fingertips. Anastasia is sitting in the front with Roster. There is a barrier that divides the front from the back, so Agatha and Fedor are cut off from their traveling companions.
Agatha doesn’t mind. It gives her a rest from the maternal affection she’s been receiving these last few months. Since her mother came to stay she has offered her opinion on every aspect of Agatha’s life. A couple of days ago, the tension boiled over.
Anastasia saw the photo of Precious. Her daughter is sent material from all the London galleries; she’s a patron of many. Anastasia was riffling through the post and came across the brochure. She recognized the woman on the front as Precious, from the images provided to Agatha by a private security firm she employed. Anastasia flicked through the brochure, and recognized another of the pictures, presented as a thumbnail at the back. She went to the gallery by herself one morning to see the full image, to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. She asked the attendant if he knew the name of the man in the picture, and he sneered at her, as if she’d just asked him whether Caravaggio was still alive.
“I don’t think it’s listed. They’re all characters from the neighborhood in which the artist immersed herself.”
Anastasia knew exactly who the man was, she just wanted to make sure. She went back home to Agatha with a selection of postcards from the exhibition. She stole the postcards so she wouldn’t have to queue at the counter, slipping them into the pocket of her long trench coat.
She showed the faces to her daughter. Agatha recognized Precious but not the man.
“Why are you showing me this?”
Anastasia thrust the postcard closer to her daughter’s face. “Not the black girl. The man. Look at him,” she implored. “He used to work for your father. He’s
just what we need.”
“In what sense is he just what we need?”
“He was a legend back in the day. The hardest man north of the river, and that was only because the gangs in the south wouldn’t come up this way to test themselves against him.”
“Amazing,” Agatha said dryly. She was in her bathroom, flossing her teeth. Anastasia went to sit on the edge of the bath.
“None of your legal methods are working, Agy. It’s taking far too long. If you want any of those new flats built this decade, you need the whores out quickly.”
Agatha continued to pull the thin white tape from the plastic reel. She cut it to size, then threaded it between two incisors. She looked at her mother in the mirror but didn’t reply.
“Did you hear what I said? It’s not working. Nothing is happening!”
Agatha pulled the thread back and forth several times, then repeated the procedure. She remained calm while her mother’s temper swelled.
“You’re a bloody idiot!” shouted Anastasia. She threw the exhibition postcards at her daughter, and stormed out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
It was good to be leaving London. The city felt restless, potentially dangerous, and there had been a couple of strange encounters. The first was with an aggressive canvasser who came to Agatha’s door. The second was with a disgusting-looking tramp who accosted her near her house and kept going on at her about some ancient artifact he’d found, and would she like to buy it off him. The man was obviously crazy.
Agatha has traveled this route many times before. Roster used to drive her from London to her school in North Yorkshire. Now she comes this way to visit her horses, to watch them race, and to stay in her country house.
There’s shooting on the estate but it is not something in which she takes an interest. Landowning neighbors have begged her to keep the gamekeepers on. They offered to help manage the staff, run the shooting, and maintain the moorland to prevent it turning to scrub.
Agatha has no interest in shooting pheasant, nor does she have any interest in allowing rich men from London and Dubai to tramp through her woods and over her moors, firing shot at the sky.
She dismissed the majority of the grounds staff as soon as she took possession of the property. There were complaints from the local community and obnoxious articles in the village gazette. Obviously she didn’t bother to read these, and ultimately it was her choice and nobody could do a thing about it.
While she is here, she will see her eldest sister. Valerie Howard has lived on the land all her life. She was born to Donald and his teenage sweetheart in 1936 and raised by her mother and grandparents in the village while her father made his fortune in the city. She never left. She never married. She worked on the smallholding, milking cows and collecting eggs. When her father bought Bythwaite Hall in the 1960s—bought from the family he’d poached from as a lad—Donald installed his first daughter in the gatehouse, told her to look after the place, paid her a cursory stipend. She has been there ever since.
Valerie has lived off the land all her life. She hates the fucking land. She hates the dirt that gets under her fingernails and into her clothes and hair. She hates the weeds that strangle the crops. She hates the foxes that come in the night for her hens. She hates the hens that get themselves caught, that pick up infections, that peck their own eggs to a gritty pulp before she gets a chance to collect them. She hates the cows that stand there all day looking at her with those blank, accusatory eyes, or that moan into the night after she slaughters their calves. She hates the flies and the wasps and the aphids and the bees and the beetles and the birds and the rats and the mice and all the dirt that won’t come out.
She repeats these sentiments to Agatha every time they meet, like a veteran soldier reliving the trauma of war. And she does all she can to destroy the land. Pesticides are her friends. She embraces toxins. If she had her way the whole estate would be concrete and animal traps and barbed wire fences.
She makes Agatha laugh. Last time Agatha was up at Bythwaite Hall, the two sisters walked the perimeter of the estate. Valerie has been doing this every year since before Agatha was born, and now that Agatha owns the property, they do it together. It is the closest thing Agatha has to a family tradition. The walk is just under fifteen miles and it takes the whole day, over moors clad with heather, through copses of oak and ash and hazel. In places, the scent of wild garlic is so strong Agatha has to cover her mouth and nose with her sleeve. In other places, the air is so fresh, she feels as if she could live off just one breath for the rest of her life.
They take lunch with them. Valerie prepares a selection of old-fashioned sandwiches, with fillings like corned beef or salmon paste and cucumber, which Agatha finds herself enjoying despite herself. They eat them while sitting on a dry-stone wall or a tree stump. Valerie calls this walk The Beating of the Bounds. Last time they did it Agatha asked Valerie where the phrase came from, and Valerie simply took hold of her long walking stick, made from a branch of yew with a cleft at the top for her to rest her thumb in, and started thrashing at the vegetation at each side of the path.
Valerie walks with her ancient bitch Border terrier, Bunny, and last time, Agatha was able to introduce her to Fedor, who was at that point still quite puppyish. The old bitch will now be able to walk clean underneath the body of the long dog without so much as bowing her grizzled head. Last time, she spent a couple of minutes humoring the puppy’s playful advances, then spent the rest of the fifteen miles entirely ignoring him. Fedor kept bending his front legs and lowering his head to the ground, wagging his tail, then letting out a couple of plaintive, high-pitched yelps. After a while he gave up, and while his old cousin trotted after her mistress, tucking herself into the path, nose almost pressed against Valerie’s rubber boots, Fedor bounded off, ranging across the heather, jogging between tussocks and shrubs, jumping over muddy puddles, then stooping to bury his nose in interesting scents.
Agatha led the way. The path was thin and the grasses on either side were high and uneven, and rigid with frost. The sisters could only walk in single file. Valerie was slower than she had been before.
“Valerie, how old are you?” Agatha asked.
“It’s rude to ask a lady her age. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
Instead, Agatha did the calculations in her head. “You must be at least eighty.”
“I suppose I must be.”
“You are very fit for someone of that age.”
“I suppose I am.”
They continued to walk. Valerie then asked Agatha if she was still embroiled in “that spot of bother with the mucky lasses”.
Agatha explained that she was, but that she was working with the police to sort something out. They would probably make some arrests soon.
Valerie dug her stick into the ground and leant down on it, then turned round to face her young sister. “There were once an infestation up at big house. Bees, it were. You were still a baby and without father, I was only one around to look after place. I saw them coming in and out through eves so I went in to have a look. There were thousands of them. Do you know what I did?”
“What?”
“I got one of them smoke canisters they put in hulls of warships to clear rats off. I put it in hall and pulled out pin, then legged it. There were so much smoke. You’ve never seen like. Thick clouds of smoke. Gray, but so gray it were almost blue. It came pouring out of everywhere. It came out through gaps in window frames, out from cracks beneath doors. It came pouring out through tiny holes in brick and plasterwork. Out through chimneys. Out through roof. It was like big house were bleeding. Bleeding its guts out like a pig. It were a sight to see. And it did for the bees. I used to go in to sweep place every spring, and I were still finding them carcasses ten years later”
Valerie pulled her stick out of the ground and continued to walk, beating at the debris around the path as she went.
Of all the sisters, Valerie is the one who most resembles Agatha, even tho
ugh she is now old. None of the other sisters look like her at all. In Agatha’s opinion, at least.
Agatha cannot know how much she looks like her father. She never met him. People say she looks like her mother. It is a compliment: her mother is an exceptionally beautiful woman. Agatha is beautiful too, but not as breathtakingly beautiful as Anastasia, and whatever it is in her that has diminished her mother’s perfection must come from her father. She isn’t sure what this essence of him is, but it is certainly something that Agatha and Valerie share.
The only point of reference Agatha has for how her father looked is photographs, gaudy paintings, and her own appearance and that of her sisters. Although it might seem as if the photographs or paintings would offer the most accurate, faithful, true-to-life portrait of the man, this is not the case at all, for the photographs and paintings are not alive. They do not move, they do not breathe, they do not make a sound, they do not smell like him, they do not reveal character, mannerisms, gait. The best approximation Agatha can make for the father she never met comes as a composite of herself and his other children. Agatha and these five other women each carry a portion of his whole.
• • •
The journey from central London to Ryedale is mostly on motorways and dual carriageways. Agatha suffers from motion sickness so is unable to read in the car, but she listens to an audiobook about the Thirty Years’ War. At the halfway point of the journey they pull in at a motorway service station so Fedor can stretch his legs.
Agatha generally prefers to stay in the car during these breaks to avoid the fat, lumpy people who trudge from the car park to the fast-food restaurants. They spill coffee and sugary drinks on the floors and tables and their children shout and scream. They can’t use the toilet without strewing paper all over the floor or pissing on the toilet seat. The thought of these communal lavatories makes her feel ill. All those ugly, dirty, stupid creatures pissing and shitting and menstruating in the cubicles next to her.
On this occasion she’s not permitted to remain in the car. Anastasia wants to buy a new lipstick. She opens the back door of the car and drags Agatha out, insisting she help her choose. Agatha tries to persuade her to wait until they are back in London so she can go to Selfridges or Harvey Nichols or a Mayfair boutique, but Anastasia apparently wants the lipstick immediately. Agatha goes with her into the service station and finds a makeup concession inside a small branch of Tesco. Her mother is such a child.