Weeks in Naviras

by Wimpress, Chris

  We exchanged email addresses before I dropped her off, then I drove quickly to Dad’s flat where I found him in another of his stupors, the radio still turned up full blast. The next day Liz ran a story about how James had friends in high places in Washington, it was buried on page twelve of her paper and wasn’t really picked up by anyone except for the blogs. James wondered out loud the next morning whom the ‘well-connected source’ might be, not thinking for a moment it could be me.

  Bobby’s sleeping wasn’t great in the first six months, and spending untold hours on my own provided unwelcome time to ruminate. Especially at night, when I’d go downstairs so James could get some sleep. Standing alone in the living room feeding Bobby I became quite transfixed by the American news networks in those small hours of the morning, their primetime bulletins replayed on their British affiliates. Morgan was rarely out of the news.

  ‘Any evidence of a state-sponsored Chinese cyber attack must and will be considered an act of war,’ she declared to reporters one night. ‘But you know, the fact of the matter is that China is only conducting its affairs in this way because it’s frightened of the outside world. And I just feel that pandering to this paranoia will send out the wrong message to the American people.’

  ‘It’s all lining up,’ I told Bobby, who was looking up at me while suckling, quiet and warm. ‘She’s going to take over the world.’ It was a bit disappointing to me that she was playing by the same old rules as other politicians, trumpeting the oil industry even though people were seriously questioning the size of America’s reserves. Still I was delighted for her, willed her on. Maybe it’s because I’d met her, found it somehow flattering that I’d spent time in the personal company of a woman who might one day go all the way. Perhaps also that I’d seen a different side to her on the terrace in parliament, one that few people would ever see.

  Rosie announced a few weeks later that she was getting married to the tedious Foreign Office wonk she’d brought to Naviras the previous year. Actually, he’d left government to become a private consultant, no doubt quadrupling his salary in the process. It seemed incongruous at first; Rosie had displayed no sign of ever being wildly in love. I think sometimes the husbands of women like Rosie know they’ve not quite sealed the deal, but they’re happy enough to go through life’s rituals. Maybe they just think they’ll get to have affairs later.

  I don’t think Rosie ever seriously harboured aspirations to become an MP herself, always knew she was more effective as a backroom operator. She must have also known deep down that not enough people really liked her. One doesn’t need to have everyone in the party liking you to get elected, but you need enough of the right people on-side.

  Rosie never came close to achieving that, except of course with James. During that period she was a distant object, rarely coming to Eppingham and keeping a low profile at Westminster. I saw her and her fiancé on the Commons terrace a month before they were married, it became clear to me that underneath the demure façade she was quite the nag. Her poor fiancée was never allowed out of her field of vision and seemed to be on an invisible leash. At one point that evening Rosie’s eyes met mine; perhaps my face revealed I knew about her and James. We froze, then I looked away first.

  Gail came out to Eppingham one Saturday afternoon. ‘Oh my God, you’ve become the Countess of Essex,’ she said, marvelling at the size of our house. Already our lives had diverged tangentially; normally both too busy to catch up much in London, but it went further than that. Gail’s love life consisted of multiple dating, or ‘the revolving carousel of love’, as she called it. ‘I’m seeing three blokes at the moment, I like to have at least two on the go at any one time.’

  She went into details about her sexy city boy – ‘He’s a tool. Emotionally dead.’ Then her online university lecturer pull – ‘Hopeless in bed, but he’s got good chat.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to keep quiet about that one,’ she said. ‘Do you promise?’

  He was a senior barrister at another chambers, they’d crossed swords in court during the only major case Gail had lead on and lost. ‘It’s a mistake, I know, but he’s teaching me far more than I could learn anywhere else. I wouldn’t be seeing him if he didn’t have a wife.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Even if I did feel like settling down, I wouldn’t dream of doing it with another lawyer. And for the record, L, I don’t feel like settling down.’

  ‘Don’t you want kids?’

  ‘Absolutely not, I mean can you see me holding a crappy nappy?’ She regretted saying it instantly. ‘Are you thinking about having another one?’

  ‘Well, James wants to, and I definitely want a brother or sister for this one,’ I said, looking down at Bobby. ‘Maybe it’s be better to get the whole thing out of the way.’

  I was surprised when she nodded. ‘You’ll find things are a lot easier if you play it like that. You’ll get a much fairer wind if they think you’re all done and dusted. You’d be 35 with all your sprogs popped. They’d like that.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Any future employer,’ she replied, looking at me intently.

  Even though Bobby was a fairly placid baby I dared not take him to Rosie’s wedding, fearing he’d cry during the service. I was already aware of Rosie’s determination to avoid what she saw as failures of decorum during my own wedding. I didn’t take it personally, James and I had been among the first of our friends to get married, those who wed later always had the luxury of learning lessons.

  Rosie’s service was high Anglican with no quirkiness to it, perhaps because half a dozen Tory backbenchers had accepted invitations. Owing to Rosie’s growing network and allure quite a few journalists attended, too. It ended up on the blogs but not in the papers. She never showed any outward hostility to me, and saw her wedding as part of the effort, a brand exercise. This included James most especially. I wasn’t surprised, though, to discover later that she’d almost entirely edited both him and me from her wedding photos.

  At Rosie’s wedding I felt like I’d turned a corner with her. As she walked down the aisle and saw me, I wondered whether she felt like she’d lost to me in some way, had settled for someone else once she’d realised James was out of bounds. Still I kept a close eye on her for a long time afterward, and of course never stopped hating her.

  Although James was resigned about going to Naviras – ‘again’ was a suffix he’d sometimes accidentally apply to it – he was never very keen on political people coming out there. Rav and Rosie were part of his inner core, but other MPs were strangely not invited. I’d even suggested it to a few backbenchers who sounded intrigued, but James would never follow it up. I couldn’t see why he’d be embarrassed about being in Naviras, it was remote but comfortable. It wasn’t ramshackle or tacky, so was he really embarrassed about me?

  Lottie showed no sign of wanting to wind down Casa Amanhã, even if she seemed to have aged considerably the next time we went out. She’d given Luis a lot more responsibility for the accounts and had taken a step back in kitchen, taking on more staff to do the cooking. But she still hovered behind them as they were working, sometimes getting annoyed when things weren’t just so. She’d taken up painting, normally landscapes and usually of places around Naviras. Occasionally she’d drive up the coast to paint some deserted beach, or inland to take in a vineyard or a farmhouse. But she’d painted one portrait, of me, or at least of the back of me, standing on the slipway looking out to sea. I was shocked to see it hanging up in the vestibule, couldn’t understand how she’d managed to paint it until Lottie explained it derived from a photo she’d taken of me the previous year. ‘I took it without you noticing, very sneaky of me,’ she giggled. ‘It’s been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘You can take it as a housewarming present, maybe?’

  Some of her paintings ended up in the public parts of Casa Amanhã, but mostly she kept them in her private rooms, which took up a whole wing of the house wher
e very few people were ever invited. The paintings competed for space with her expansive and seemingly disorganised library. Yet she had a book on almost everything and always knew exactly where to find it. Once I told her how I’d been trying to grow gazanias in my garden in Eppingham but they wouldn’t survive year-round. ‘I have just the book you need,’ she declared, disappearing off for a five minutes, returning with a well-thumbed copy of The Cacti and Succulents of Portugal, an English translation. ‘Now look here,’ she flipped through the book until she found the entry on gazanias. I took the book down to the beach bar to read as Lottie painted. ‘They’re not really succulents, of course,’ she said. ‘But all you need do is regrow them from cutting in the winter. Do you have a greenhouse?’

  ‘No, but we’ve got a conservatory.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you could grow them in there for a while, I suppose, if you kept the heating on.’

  ‘Mind you, when this little fellow gets bigger he’ll be pulling them up,’ I said, nodding at Bobby asleep in his pushchair.

  She pulled a thin paintbrush out of the bun in her hair, which was noticeably whiter. She chewed on the end of the brush for a moment. ‘I’ve been so, what’s the word? So very thrilled at how you’ve settled into motherhood, darling. I must say I worried it wouldn’t be for you, especially so soon after getting married. But you’ve taken to it marvellously.’

  ‘Thanks, Lottie.’ I suspected this to be a Trojan horse, to get me to open up about how I really felt about my evolving life. ‘I’m looking forward to getting back to work, though. Even though it’s going to be tough, and Bobby will have to have a nanny.’

  ‘Oh, just pack up everything and come and live in Naviras,’ Lottie had gone back to mixing colours. ‘I hear you can work from more or less anywhere these days, what with all this wireless they’re putting in everywhere.’

  ‘That’s true for a lot of people, but not MPs,’ I said, eventually. ‘You have to be there for constituency work. And voting.’

  ‘Just as well, darling. Things are much better when they’re done face-to-face, don’t you think?’

  I nodded. The first night we’d arrived in Naviras the painting in Room Seven had been ever so slightly squint. Behind it a note; I hope things are better for you. But you know where I am, if they’re not. xx

  I didn’t leave any response, not until the last day of our trip.

  Things hadn’t got any better, until I saw you again, xx

  I would’ve written more, but James had been yelling from the foot of the staircase, warning me we’d be late for our plane.

  In September I went back to work, and my reservations about Bobby proved unfounded. Our first nanny in Eppingham was actually Portuguese, so we got along very well. Her name was Paula and she was originally from Porto. She’d heard of Naviras but hadn’t been there so we had plenty to talk about. I’d have short conversations with her in the mornings and evenings. What really snookered us during that year was the general election. With a fairly slender majority James had a fight on his hands, but he was also ensconced in London for much of the time, working up strategy and messaging for the party. The fundraising dinners became almost nightly affairs, James’s job being to entertain the middle-tier of donors and give speeches.

  I’d assumed that once Parliament was dissolved James would be in Eppingham more often, but actually his time away from the house increased dramatically, pounding the doorsteps of the constituency but also spending many nights attending meetings at party HQ. The prize, he told me, was a place in Cabinet, assuming the party secured a majority.

  Around this time I began to think the forbidden thought; wouldn’t it be a lot easier on us if the Tories remained in opposition? What I feared more than anything was the party being the largest in Parliament but in a minority government, this was no longer uncommon and always led to things becoming quickly febrile and constantly stressful. As such I was fairly relieved when the Tories defied expectations and Ollie Drake romped home with a majority of fifteen.

  James became prisons minister, not the most harrowing of jobs but more demanding than the whips’ office. The new Parliament was quite different from the previous one, most obviously because there were a lot more female MPs than before. This should’ve been a good thing, except personally I found many of them obnoxious. It wasn’t long before I realised they didn’t particularly like me. Perhaps they somehow felt I’d taken a short-cut; had just spread my legs to get into the Westminster bubble instead of fighting for a seat like they had. Maybe I reminded them that progress was conditional, could easily be reversed. In a strange way I always felt like a hostage during that time, that I’d surrendered my liberty so they could exercise theirs. I was aware this made no sense at all, but if anything the feeling grew as time passed.

  The following summer Gail came out to Naviras with us, only her second visit and presumably her last. She was making serious money by that point, the doyenne of the Inner Temple and too busy for husbands. She was one of the first people to ever stay in the hotel, not because she saw herself as too good for Casa Amanhã but because she’d only been sure she could come out a week before the holiday, by which time Lottie was fully-booked.

  I was surprised at how much Gail kept to herself during that trip, quietly reading on the terrace at the beach bar. She was interested in politics but still glazed over when James brayed about his new job. She remained resolutely single and while she took a casual interest in Bobby, I knew the attention he required began to grate on her. I’d been surprised that she’d made the trip at all, but her reasons became clear four days later when Lottie summoned us both and took us for a walk down to the beach bar, ordering a bottle of white wine before taking us out to a table on the sun deck, where we watched James walking down the beach with Bobby in his arms.

  ‘Now I want to discuss something very serious, and I’m glad you’re both here to help out,’ said Lottie. ‘You’re both sworn to secrecy, okay?’ We nodded as Lottie poured the wine. ‘Whatever you say, Ellie, I know you’re not happy with James and that one day you’re going to want to leave him. I know you’ve poured all your money into your marriage and you’re feeling stuck. That’s why I asked Gail to come out this week, because we’ve been discussing you for quite some time, now.’

  I was shocked. I turned to Gail, who stared back at me defiantly. ‘Someone’s got to have your back, Ellie. I know you won’t like the idea of us plotting like this but Lottie and I worry about you, a lot.’

  Lottie nodded. ‘I’ve decided to take some steps to make sure you’ll always be secure, whatever happens.’ She nodded to Gail, who reached into her handbag and pulled out some papers, placing them on the table. Lottie picked them up, her hand trembling slightly. ‘Since I don’t have any real family, I’ve had to start thinking about what happens after I’m gone. My plan initially was to bequeath Casa Amanhã to you in my will,’ she said, looking down at the papers and then up at me. ‘But it’d be taxed to the hilt by the Portuguese, and I’ve since been told by lovely Gail it’d cause all sorts of other problems, legally.’

  ‘Portuguese probate law,’ Gail chipped in. ‘There’d be wrangling because you’re neither a relative nor a Portuguese national.’

  ‘This is ridiculous, Lottie!’ Instinctively I picked up my glass and took a large gulp. My hand was also shaking as I set it back down on the table. ‘You can’t possibly do this.’

  ‘I can, darling. In fact I’ve already done it, with Gail’s help.’ Lottie handed the papers to me but I refused to take them. ‘Truly, there’s no-one else I’d want to bequeath the place to and this way, I’ll know you’ll always have an escape route from him.’ She gave a dismissive little wave towards James. ‘Now. Gail’s kindly had this all drawn up for us, and as of today I no longer own Casa Amanhã. You do, so long as you sign this thing. I just hope you won’t mind me staying there, darling?’ She beamed at me. ‘As long as you don’t charge me any rent.’

  ‘Technically, the house will go into a trust,’ said G
ail. ‘A business, run out of Lisbon. That’s to stop James from ever claiming half of it from you, if you got divorced.’ She sounded hopeful. ‘He’ll never find out you’re the owner, so long as you don’t tell him.’

  ‘Something I sincerely don’t recommend doing,’ added Lottie.

  I couldn’t quite take it all in. ‘What about Luis, or Carolina? They need this much more than I do.’

  ‘Ah, now. Luis already has somewhere to live in Naviras and I’m afraid I’m just not convinced having Casa Amanhã’s in his best interests. Frankly, I think it’s about time he works out what he wants to do with his life, rather than living in the shadow of someone else’s. Don’t you think?’

  ‘He won’t like this,’ I said, before realising I was saying too much.

  ‘Please sign it, Ellie,’ said Gail. ‘It’s what Lottie wants, she’s been calling me about this for months. It’ll secure your future, whatever happens.’

  ‘I’m only doing this now because I can see the way things are going,’ said Lottie, severely. ‘I don’t want you thinking that there’s no way out. If you stay with him, that’s your decision, of course. But one day I won’t be around, and I don’t want Casa Amanhã in the hands of anyone who wouldn’t look after it properly. In the meantime, you can always come and live here, of course, whenever you want to.’

  This persuasion continued for another half an hour; brow-beaten and worn down by the two of them, I signed the papers.

  ‘The way I’ve engineered things, it’s almost impossible to tell who owns it,’ said Gail. ‘Portuguese law is ridiculous in many ways, but there are some little exploits,’ she smirked. ‘You won’t have to do anything, it’ll all run itself.’

  Lottie sipped her wine, seeming very pleased. We never discussed the transaction again.

  Unreliable mobile phones would once again have a part to play that holiday. Throughout the village there’d only ever been a patchy signal and needless to say Lottie refused to countenance any form of internet in Casa Amanhã. The only place where mobile conversations were dependable was at La Roda, which like so much in Naviras had been taken over by an English couple who’d installed wifi on the terrace, ditched the Portuguese music and had even thought about changing its name before Lottie protested. As James’s career became more demanding he spent more time there, turning the veranda into a makeshift office.