This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Outside the airport, a bicycle creaks past, powered into the headwind by an octogenarian with a pipe. Maeve clears her throat, raises a hand to her mouth; Lucas manages to stop the words, are you OK and do you feel sick, from making it out into the air. He is forced to do this, on average, every three minutes, has to stop himself saying, how do you feel, do you feel anything, are you nauseous, just a little bit, a lot, is your sense of smell enhanced, do you feel tired, more tired than normal, less, do you feel anything out of the ordinary, anything at all, has it worked, do you think, oh, please, for God’s sake, let it work.

  ‘Um,’ Maeve says. ‘Is she definitely coming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure we’re in the right place?’

  ‘Yup,’ he says, with a confidence he doesn’t feel.

  Maeve swings her head from side to side, shivering again in the blasting wind. ‘She arrived yesterday?’

  ‘Two days ago. Maybe three.’

  ‘And she knows we were on this flight?’

  Lucas shrugs. ‘She booked it.’

  Maeve snorts. ‘I very much doubt that.’

  ‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘she would have asked one of her minders, or whatever they are, to book it, I suppose, but I don’t—’

  ‘Is she travelling with her minders? Do you think this might be one of them now?’

  She points at a blue car circling the rockery roundabout. The car pulls up at the kerb and a person of indeterminate gender steps out wearing a moth-eaten, ankle-length garment, mirrored sunglasses and an alarming balaclava.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ Lucas murmurs, and Maeve gives a laugh.

  The doors to the cattle-shed airport flap open and shut, the bicycle creaks on.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Maeve breathes, ‘he’s coming over.’

  ‘Quick,’ Lucas whispers. ‘Look busy.’

  They turn, in unison, to examine a peeling bus timetable behind them. When Lucas casts a look over his shoulder, the person from the car is sidling up to them. He decides not to risk eye contact but to look steadfastly away, as if fascinated by the line of wind-battered trees. Maeve affects deep interest in the timetable.

  ‘Got a light?’ the balaclava person says, in a thick Irish brogue.

  ‘No,’ Lucas says to the trees.

  ‘Go on, give us a light.’

  ‘I don’t have one. I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Lucas spins his head just as the sunglasses are lifted and the balaclava pulled down. His sister is grinning at them.

  ‘Jesus.’ Lucas cuffs her on the shoulder, then hugs her, then cuffs her again. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘I never knew my Irish accent was so convincing. I’m going to remember that.’ She hugs Maeve, jiggles the car keys in her palm. ‘Well, are you going to stand there all day or are you coming?’

  ‘We’re coming,’ he grumbles. ‘What else would we bloody well be here for?’

  Before they get into the rental car, Lucas and Claudette must stand in the freezing gale to argue about who should sit where. He thinks she should drive; she is sure it should be him. He counters that she can’t map-read but she can drive; she says, try me. Maeve opens the back door, muttering that she often wishes she had siblings but at other times she’s glad she doesn’t. Claudette says he can’t map-read because he doesn’t know where they are going.

  ‘True,’ he says, and clicks open the driver’s door, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’

  She slides into the passenger seat, slams the door, and the relief at being in a confined, windless space is enormous. She unfolds a map, talking about a slightly longer route that goes past a beautiful mountain. Her hair spills out of the constraints of the balaclava. The last time he had seen her, six months ago, or was it seven, it had been dyed brown but it’s back to its original colour. As a child, her hair had been pale gold, almost colourless, hanging down her back in plaits that flicked from side to side like whips; their mother had braided them each morning before school.

  She looks at him, map in hand, the balaclava still obscuring the lower half of her face.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he says, with a patience he doesn’t feel. ‘Can I ask that now?’

  ‘I …’ she begins, her voice muffled by the balaclava, then stops.

  He frowns, looks at her more closely, leaning towards her, as if to avoid missing any clue she might drop. A film location, a meeting with an obscure Irish writer, some bizarre photo-shoot: he and Maeve had speculated on all of these. But, looking at her in this rental car, on this bleak, wind-battered road, quite alone, quite unchaperoned, he realises it’s something completely different.

  ‘What?’ he says, seized with a sudden foreboding. ‘What is it? Are you OK? Is it Timou? What’s happened? What’s he done now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing’s happened. I just … I was thinking …’ she glances away from him, out of the window ‘… I need your help with something.’

  ‘With what?’ Lucas asks.

  Claudette turns to face him and her eyes are bright, almost defiant. ‘It’s hard to explain. Better that I just show you.’

  He turns to Maeve, to roll his eyes at her – Claudette and her bizarre whims are common ground between them – but the jokey utterance forming dies on his lips because, in the back seat, he sees two things simultaneously. His wife with a face that is stretched and still and also pleading. And a baby seat, one of those that fits into a car backwards. Over its black plastic side, it is possible to see the soft curve of a tiny head, covered with dark down.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘The baby’s here.’

  Claudette looks at him, she looks at Maeve. ‘Well, I could hardly leave him behind,’ she says, ‘now could I?’

  Rain hurls itself against the windscreen in staccato gusts; the wipers flail back and forth, sisyphean in their ineffectuality. Lucas has to lean forward to see the road before them. Through the rain, through the steamed-up windows, it is just possible to make out the louring bulk of mountains at the sides of the road, huddles of trees, the pocked surface of rivers.

  Claudette and Maeve are talking, as they always do, as they have done since they were all teenagers at school. About the kids they took up Helm Crag the other day, about Claudette’s search for a nanny, about the script she is currently reading, about Pascaline’s unfathomable penchant for broken furniture.

  ‘Left here,’ his sister throws in, interrupting a monologue about the many chairs of their mother’s in which it is forbidden to sit. Lucas knows both these women, probably better than anyone else in the world, and he knows that, underneath their surface conversation, Claudette is not mentioning the embryos and how they might be faring, how they have eleven more days until they find out whether they have stayed, whether they have hung on or whether they have fallen, drifted, feathers on a breeze, to somewhere beyond reach, beyond recall. She isn’t mentioning the cost of the treatment, or that he and Maeve have no more embryos in storage, that this is their last chance. He also knows that although Maeve is asking about Timou and the next film, what she is really thinking, what she is really saying to Claudette is: if only. And: please. And: I’m terrified, I don’t know how we’ll cope if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what we’ll do.

  A rough track unribbons before them, the car climbing and climbing the side of a hill of gorse and moss and bare grey rock. Claudette gets out, again and again, to open and close five-bar gates.

  ‘Is this right?’ Lucas asks, as she gets back into the car, bringing with her the scent of bracken, of weather.

  Claudette nods, brushing rain from her brow.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nods again.

  The wheels skid and flail against grit but they turn a corner and suddenly, before them, is a small clearing, cut through with a stream, silver birches gathered at its banks. Lucas edges the car forward, and out of the mist appear shapes, angles and planes, faint at first but then more distinct. He peers ahead, straining his eyes, wonde
ring if he had seen anything at all, whether whatever it is might just vanish, as mysteriously as it had arrived. But, as he looks, it resolves, assuming corporeal form. He can make out a window, a wall, a roof.

  By the stream, in the lee of a meander, stands a stone house. It has casement windows in peeling white paint, a tiled roof, a front door, which stands half open, like a door in a fairytale, as if they are to be lured from their lives into a parallel adventure.

  ‘There!’ Claudette says, with an odd flourish of her hand, as if she has pulled off some magic trick, as if she summoned this vision from the earth itself. ‘Want to see inside?’

  At that moment, there is a noise from the back, like the wingbeat of a small bird. Both he and Maeve turn, in unison, towards the baby’s seat. Claudette doesn’t take her eyes off the front façade of the house. ‘Oh, he’s woken up,’ she murmurs, pushing open the door. ‘Perfect timing.’

  Lucas passes through the doorways of the house. Green shoots are pushing up through gaps in the floorboards, curling their fingers through slits in the window frames, insinuating themselves into the plasterwork. Strips of wallpaper in what was once the dining room have given up their adhesion and slumped, defeated and ignored, to the floor. The place has a damp, vegetal scent. No one has lived here for a long time.

  In the kitchen there is an old, blackened stove, still bearing a kettle, as if thirsty visitors might arrive at any moment. There are cobwebbed plates in the rack above the algae-stained sink, a tin of baking soda, sealed shut with rust, on the shelf, a curled shoe sole by the range. The lead of a long-departed dog hangs on a nail by the back door, its leather cracked and peeling, waiting for its canine familiar.

  Lucas paces. He looks at the ceilings, at the walls, at the cart-ography of damp climbing the wainscot. He walks to the front of the house; he walks to the rear. He forces open the back door and stands there for a moment, the step worn alluvial-smooth beneath his feet; he considers the side of the mountain, the copse of aspens at the ramshackle fence. The rain has stopped, blown over, and the land is sodden, lush and green, illuminated with fallen water.

  He climbs the stairs, keeping to the wall side. Safer that way, although there is no woodworm, no rot that he can see. On the landing, he turns his head one way, a big room with a bay window, overlooking the stream, and the other, a clawfooted bath overhung by a mildewed heater. He moves forward through a doorway into a space with low, slanted ceilings, two tall windows, vague shapes of things at the walls. He is treading across the floor, intending to look out at the view from here when it comes to him what the shapes around him are: beds, small beds, lots of them, pushed back to the walls, tarnished brass knobs on their tops, one with symmetrical curlicues on its side, one with a canopy, rotted now, of course, and curved wooden runners at its base. To rock a child, he supposes, to lull it, to soothe.

  What is the word for that kind of bed? he wonders, looking at it as if he’s never seen such a thing before, so ornate it is, like a miniature marquee. The walls, he sees now, are decorated with depictions of toys. He can make out, through the dust and decay, a striped drum, a toy soldier, a teddy bear with a ribbon round its neck. So, a nursery. For a family with – how many? – six children. He counts the beds, turning in the middle of the room. Six. The number rolls around his head. Seven, if you count the baby.

  As his mind admits the word ‘baby’, it supplies him with another: ‘cradle’. He looks again at the canopied bed with the rockers. Cradle. You would place the baby in there, under the canopy, which would once have been draped with fabric and lace – he’s seen such things in museums, in costume dramas – and then it goes to sleep, just like that.

  Astonishing, he thinks, how small babies are. He looks from one end of the cradle to the other. How can an entire person fit in there? He’d caught a glimpse of Claudette’s baby, Ari, his nephew, before Claudette had strapped him into a kind of papoose thing on her front. Dark curls, a frown, pursed lips and, yes, eyes that reminded him strangely of his own. He and Maeve had looked, they’d made themselves look, they’d stood behind her as she lifted him from his car seat, they’d exclaimed things to the air about how beautiful he was, how sweet, how lovely. He could feel the steel in Maeve as they did so, the effort it took her. Claudette slotted Ari into the sling without turning round. Lucas saw a socked foot, a curled fist, a cheek creased by sleep. He wanted to take Maeve’s hand but didn’t dare. Then Claudette had turned and given them both a level look that told them they weren’t fooling anyone, one hand curved over the baby’s head. Right, she’d said, let’s go.

  Maeve, he thinks. She mustn’t come into this room. It must not happen. He turns towards the door, as if to bar the way.

  He can hear them downstairs, in the drawing room – a place with a high ceiling, a huge marble fireplace, the skeletal remains of a sofa, the floor strewn with disgorged horsehair. His sister’s voice is telling his wife that it was an old hunting lodge, built as a weekend retreat by the landowners of a big house near the village. The big house is gone, she is saying, lost in a fire years ago, during the Troubles. This is all that’s left, she says.

  He can hear the murmur of his wife, their footfalls, and the high yips of another voice – Ari’s. He can hear Claudette speaking to the baby in quiet, soothing murmurs.

  Lucas looks again about the room. A hunting lodge where seven children once slept, under pictures of drums and teddy bears.

  ‘Hi,’ a voice behind him says.

  Lucas whirls round, as if caught doing something wrong. Claudette is standing in the doorway. The balaclava disguise is gone; her hair surrounds her, like a cloak. She is herself again, unmistakably so.

  ‘Maeve,’ he panics, gesturing around him, ‘she mustn’t—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Claudette says. ‘She’s gone outside. She wanted to see what was growing in the back garden.’

  Claudette comes into the room. She touches her finger to one of the beds, to the wall. The baby is a marsupial mound on her front. ‘If I buy this place,’ she says carefully, not looking at him, ‘is it OK to put the paperwork in your name?’

  They stand together in the nursery, Claudette and Lucas and Ari.

  ‘Legally,’ she continues, ‘it would belong to you. Or appear to belong to you. I’d need your signature, nothing more.’

  Lucas considers these words: the paperwork, his name, his signature. He realises that he has known all along what this trip was about, what it means, this house, this valley, this clearing.

  He can hear Maeve in the garden below; she is digging or scraping at something. He can hear water running around the house, off the tiles, down the gutters, through the drains.

  He clears his throat. He isn’t sure what to ask but knows there must be something. ‘But,’ he begins, ‘what about …’

  She gives a tilt of the head, a minuscule movement, as if to recall something she has forgotten.

  ‘It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere, Claude,’ he whispers. ‘You couldn’t get anywhere more remote than this. You wouldn’t ever … I mean … you’re not actually going to … use this place. Are you?’

  She lifts her head. Their eyes meet.

  He tries to read her expression. ‘Claude? What’s going on? What about Timou? Does he—’

  ‘It’s just a house,’ she says, and breaks away from his gaze, walking towards the window. ‘In case I ever needed to … get away. It would be somewhere to come, somewhere to be. Just for a while.’

  ‘How long is a while?’

  She shrugs, still with her back to him. ‘It’s just a house,’ she says again.

  Lucas comes to stand next to her and together they look at the mountain, which is obscured by a girdle of cloud.

  ‘You have to promise me one thing.’ Each of his words appears as a swell of steam on the windowpane.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you won’t do anything without telling me. You won’t disappear and leave me to wonder or—’

  ‘Of course I won’t. I coul
dn’t. I’d need your help. Just don’t …’ she hesitates ‘… don’t worry if … if you’re told that I …’ She shakes her head, marshalling her thoughts. ‘Don’t necessarily believe what you’re told. Hold steady and wait until I get in touch. Because I will. You know I will.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Lucas puts both hands up to his face. He covers his eyes, as he used to do when she forced him to play her version of hide and seek, with her always the hider and he the permanent seeker. ‘I don’t even want to fully understand what you’re saying to me right now. The whole thing sounds like a ragingly terrible idea. I can’t begin to imagine what Mum will have to say about this when she—’

  ‘She’s not going to say anything because you’re not going to tell her,’ Claudette says, in a severe tone. ‘You know she’d go off at the deep end.’ She lays her hand on his arm. ‘I need an answer, Lucas. Preferably today. I need to know whether or not I can put it in your name.’

  He sighs. He twists his head from side to side, as if to free himself from some invisible shackle. He sighs again, then says, ‘OK. Fine. Put it in my name.’

  ‘You agree?’

  ‘Yes. Against my better judgement, I agree.’

  ‘That’s lucky,’ she says, with a grin, ‘because I already transferred the money to your account. You’ve got a meeting at a solicitor’s this afternoon. I’ll drive you but I’m not going to come in. They have to believe that it’s yours.’