by Julia Crouch
‘I’ll get myself some tea, thanks, Polly. Sit down, Simon,’ Rose said, busying herself with the kettle. ‘Would you like a brownie?’
‘Yes, please, Rose.’ Simon made himself comfortable at the kitchen table. ‘I’m a great fan, Polly,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said, sliding the coffee-holder into the machine.
‘You were the soundtrack of my twenties,’ he told her.
‘I’ve got some new stuff I’ve been writing. Perhaps I’ll play it for you, give you the first performance,’ she said.
‘I’d be honoured,’ he said, his eyes on her.
‘Simon’s kids are in the same class as Yannis,’ Rose said, putting a brownie in front of Simon. ‘He’s a writer. He’s married to Miranda, who’s a glamorous, big-shot barrister.’
‘I don’t think she’d describe herself like that,’ Simon blustered.
‘What do you write, Simon?’ Polly asked, putting a cup of coffee down in front of him, then sitting herself opposite.
‘Novels, mostly. And the odd bit of journalism from time to time.’
‘He’s being modest,’ Rose said. ‘Simon’s a top crime writer.’
‘Not really, I—’ he protested.
‘I’d love to read your books,’ Polly said, leaning forward so that her breasts squashed together into something approximating a cleavage.
‘I’ll drop one by,’ Simon said.
‘You could form a mutual appreciation society,’ Rose said, tucking into a brownie that she hadn’t meant to eat. ‘How is the marvellous Miranda?’ she asked Simon, swallowing. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages. We must have you both round for dinner soon.’
‘She’s great. On a long case right now, up in London during the week. It’s some complicated corporate fraud case. Frightfully dull, but she seems to find it all fascinating.’
‘She’s so lucky she’s got you,’ said Rose. ‘To hold the fort, I mean.’
It was just then that Gareth came into the kitchen. He’d been in his studio since dawn – his best time, he always said. Things were beginning to go well. As usual, Rose didn’t know the details, but he had said that he was starting on a series of drawings, or diagrams as he called them, that took the colours and shapes of the fields around them as a starting-point.
The night before, he and Rose had made love – the second night in a row, which was unusual – and afterwards he had said that he thought that, even given the arrival of Polly and the boys, their big life experiment was going better than planned. Rose had held him close.
‘Hi, Simon, how’s it going?’ Gareth went over to Rose and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’m dying for a coffee.’
‘You sit down. Let me get it.’ She jumped up.
‘Now who’s the lucky one?’ Simon winked at Rose.
‘I’d better go back to my Annexe and have a shower,’ Polly said, stretching her arms up above her head, more like a cat than Manky had ever managed.
‘I’ll walk up the path with you,’ Simon said, getting up to join her. ‘Bye, Rose, Gareth. Ta for the coffee and brownie. Delicious!’
‘Oh. OK. Bye, then,’ Rose said, Gareth’s coffee cup in hand.
‘That was a bit brief,’ Gareth said after they had gone out of the front door.
They watched through the kitchen window as Simon and Polly dawdled up through Rose’s herb garden. Polly stopped and picked a head off a lavender bush – Rose had left them on for the winter – rubbing it between her palms. She held her hand up to Simon’s face and he breathed in the scent.
‘The little minx,’ Gareth muttered.
Rose sat down next to him, looking out of the window. ‘He’s a big boy,’ she said. ‘He can take care of himself.’
‘I wonder,’ said Gareth. ‘Simon’s not famous for his discretion.’
‘Oh, that’s all just bollocks gossip,’ Rose said. ‘I hate all that.’
‘Easy, tiger,’ Gareth said, stroking her back.
They sat in silence, sipping their coffee, looking at the sparkle on the garden as, framed by the stone-edged window, it warmed in the sunshine.
‘Rose?’
She felt Gareth’s hand as he moved it gently to her shoulder, and turned to face him.
‘Yes?’
‘I love you so much,’ he said.
And they kissed, in the sharp sunlight.
Twelve
Gareth finished his coffee and went back to the studio, leaving Rose and Flossie alone in the kitchen, which seemed, for a second, a little too empty. She switched on the radio and set about clearing up the breakfast and coffee things to a discussion on Woman’s Hour about whether it was possible for modern women to have it all.
The cat came and rubbed himself against her legs.
‘Oh Manky,’ she said. ‘She didn’t even recognise you, did she? How shocking for you.’
Later, she took Flossie to Tesco to get toothbrushes, pyjamas, fleeces and wellies for the boys. She also bought a stack of boy-type magazines, a football net and football and some giant water-blaster gun things.
Before unloading the car, Rose knocked on the Annexe door to see if Polly was about. There was no reply. She went down to the house to look for her, but she wasn’t there either. Rose was a bit put out, because she had wanted to ask Polly before she moved the boys. But, she thought, it was a favour she was actually doing for them all, so she just went ahead and sorted out the spare bedroom anyway. She made up the beds, cleared out a set of shelves and swapped a couple of Gareth’s more cerebral paintings with two of Christos’s colour bursts.
When she brought the children home from school, she sent them to the Annexe to pick up the boys’ stuff.
‘Was your mum in there?’ she asked Nico as the three of them returned laden with the toys and books she had carried up there just days before.
‘Yeah, but she’s resting.’
‘Sleeping?’
‘Nah, just lying there. She said hello to us, though.’
‘Ah.’ Rose helped the boys set out their belongings. Very soon, the rather bare guest room had been transformed into a proper boys’ bedroom.
‘Wicked!’ Yannis said.
Rose fetched the new wellies and clothes she had bought from Tesco and gave them to the boys to try on. Everything fitted beautifully, although Nico said he didn’t like his new fleece, declaring it to be lame. He took himself off to the corner of the kitchen in a half-hearted attempt at a sulk.
‘Do you guys want to come and feed the chickens?’ Anna said. It was her job, and she did it every day. She loved the chickens, which she viewed as her own.
‘We can see if they’ve laid,’ she went on. ‘Though Peck probably won’t let us get near. She’s very broody right now.’
‘OK, then.’ Yannis jumped up. Nico tagged along behind them – again, too cool to show interest, but unable to keep away.
While the children got on with feeding the livestock, Rose took her trowel out to her herb garden at the front of the house, thinking that she could keep half an eye on the Annexe to see if Polly stirred.
This part of the garden had presented a lot of challenges for Rose. Before the renovations, it had been a steep slope. Then Rose, Gareth and Andy spent a weekend carving it into terraces that led down, with the help of stone steps, to the front door of the main house. When you arrived by car – which you invariably did, because most trips beyond the school involved a motor – you parked up by the Annexe and took the steps down towards The Lodge.
Gareth hadn’t been sure about this at first. Backed up by Andy, he had said that carrying the shopping down all those steps would be a pain. The two of them had spent an evening drinking beer and thrashing out a plan for moving tons of earth to bring a driveway down to the house. They filled up one of Gareth’s rough sketchbooks with diagrams and lists.
When the two of them worked together like that, Rose could see the two boys who had grown up in each other’s pockets, miles from anywhere. They were so alike, it was surprising. Raised for
selfsufficiency, they had been equipped with a deeply practical response to anything life might throw at them. Andy had told her that once he and Gareth had built a party hut: a two-roomed log cabin on the edge of Pam and John’s land. They had cleared part of the forest and fashioned the structure from the trees they had cut down. It had taken the entire summer. How different Gareth and Andy’s teenage years had been from the boozy, lazy time Rose and Polly had spent in Brighton, taking drugs on the beach, hanging out with boys on sofas.
Despite admiring the way the two of them worked, Rose had argued passionately against their pragmatic drive idea. She said they needed to separate the car from the house. She wanted to stand at the sink and see a garden, not a driveway. The backdrop to the view was the Annexe, and the car could hide behind that. If they had a beautiful old Saab, or a Maserati or something, then that might be a different matter. But seeing their practical, ugly, big old Galaxy sitting there would just be depressing.
The men couldn’t really argue with that, so Rose was very careful that, the decision having been made in her favour, she would never, ever complain or ask for help when faced with hauling a week’s worth of shopping down the steps to the house.
And she loved the herb garden that stood where the drive might have been. The space and scope for growing all sorts of esoteric varieties of thyme and lavender excited her. She was happy, while the children fed the chickens, to take the opportunity to spend a little time out there, picking around the earth, getting rid of the baby weeds that were already pushing themselves up so early in the year. Flossie sat beside her in her car seat, gurgling in the sunshine.
Rose heard the children clatter round from the back garden to the side of the house, towards the stone table and benches that stood by the pizza oven. This was where Anna sat and counted the eggs each day.
‘Well, my papa’s dead,’ Nico was saying.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know that,’ Anna said. ‘Now you’ve made me lose count.’
‘But he might come back, though,’ Yannis piped up. Rose’s heart contracted.
‘No, he won’t, malaka,’ Nico said.
‘He might, though.’
‘And my mama’s famous, though. And she’s pretty and thin,’ Nico went on.
‘Well, my mum’s pretty, too,’ said Anna, Rose’s loyal little girl.
‘And, well, my mama’s very brave. She sometimes has little cuts here and here, and sometimes they bleed,’ Yannis boasted.
‘Shut up, Yannis,’ Nico hissed.
‘And my yaya is a witch because she says Mama killed Papa,’ Yannis added.
‘She doesn’t,’ Nico said, his voice rising.
‘She does, though. I heard her, and Mama said back to Yaya that she was a witch.’
‘Yaya doesn’t mean Mama actually killed Papa,’ Nico said.
‘She does. I heard her.’
‘You didn’t, though – you just shut up, Yannis,’ Nico yelled, and there was a crash and a gasp from Anna.
‘MUM!’ Anna shouted.
Rose arrived just in time to pull Nico off his brother. He was screaming, Yannis was crying and the eggs lay smashed all around the patio. Anna stood there wringing her hands.
‘That’s enough, you lot,’ Rose said, holding them apart, at arm’s length, wondering how she was going to sort this one out. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spied the fox creeping into the space between the apple tree and the pear tree at the far end of the back garden.
‘Anna, are the chickens in?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Anna said, following Rose’s gaze. ‘Oh, Foxy!’
‘Look,’ whispered Rose, putting an arm round each boy. ‘See?’
‘Won’t he eat the chickens?’ Yannis asked.
‘Not if they’re in. They’ve got a fox-proof run. We love our fox,’ Rose said. ‘In fact we’ll leave these smashed eggs for him to clear up after we’ve gone.’
‘Most people in the country hate foxes, but we think he’s strong and proud,’ Anna added, using the exact words that Rose had used when they first saw him a couple of weeks after they had moved in.
The children gazed at the grizzled beast. Rose’s theory was that he had more or less taken over the garden when The Lodge had stood empty. In spite of the chickens, she was glad of his presence because he kept the rabbits away. Or, more likely, he kept the rabbits down. She didn’t like to think about it all that much.
‘The poor old fox is hunted and hated by humans,’ she said to the boys, ‘but he sees our garden as a safe place in a hostile world.’
‘And we love him,’ Anna beamed.
You’ve certainly earned your keep this afternoon, Mr Fox, Rose thought. The two boys, their fight forgotten, now stood transfixed as he dawdled across the lawn, completely unconcerned by the presence of the humans.
‘Let’s make supper,’ Rose said at last. ‘Will you go and bring Flossie in, please, Nico?’ she asked, offering the task like a gift, a proof of her trust in him after having to handle him so roughly to get him off his brother.
They went in and she set the children tasks to help prepare the meal, which she reconfigured from a roast leg of lamb to a pie, because it involved stirring stuff in pots, rolling out pastry and decorating with little leaves and initials. It was far more complicated and took longer to do than a roast, especially with an army of inexperienced sous chefs, but Rose was a great believer in the healing power of the kitchen.
Soon, Nico was cutting the lamb into cubes, and trimming it of fat, Anna was frying onions, and Yannis was rubbing flour into butter between newly washed fingers.
‘Phew – it’s hot in here,’ Rose said, and flung open the kitchen window. It was true, the early March sun had a strange intensity to it that afternoon.
When the pie was in the oven, she set the younger ones to cutting out biscuits from the leftover pastry, while she and Nico peeled some spuds.
‘So, Nico,’ she said. ‘How was your second day at school?’
‘S’OK,’ he said. ‘Except—’
‘Except what?’ Rose asked.
‘Well, a couple of the kids, they take the piss.’
‘Why?’
‘They say I speak weird.’
‘Who says you speak weird?’
‘Oh, just a couple of kids in my class. They’re morons, anyway.’
‘Names?’
‘Nah, it’s OK.’
Rose made a mental note to have a word with his teacher in the morning.
‘And how are you liking it, staying here with us?’ she went on.
‘It’s OK,’ he said.
‘Just OK?’
‘Yep,’ he said, nodding and frowning over the potato he was slowly scraping right away with the peeler.
‘You’ve finished that one, I think.’ Rose took it from his hand and put another, unpeeled one in its place.
‘And how do you think your mum is?’ she asked.
‘She’s all right.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Well . . . she’s sad. About Papa.’
‘Of course she is.’ Rose put her peeler down and bent down towards him, trying to catch his eyes. ‘It’s normal, you know, to be sad when someone you love dies.’
‘I know,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his work.
‘And – are you sad, Nico?’ she asked.
‘I . . .’ He looked up, over her shoulder, and a flicker of something Rose couldn’t define – was it fear? – passed over his face.
She turned to see Polly shivering outside at the open kitchen window, looking straight at her. Her black hair flared out around her, making her face appear small and ill-defined. She was wearing the long, semi-transparent white nightdress again. Rose noticed that in the sunlight it looked a little ripped, a little stained with what looked like dried blood. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot.
Her voice was quiet when she spoke. ‘Of course he’s sad – aren’t you, Nico?’
The boy nodded dumbly.
‘We’re all sad, Ros
e. In case you hadn’t noticed, our entire world has fallen apart.’ Then, in a burst of energy released from somewhere deep inside her, she yelled, ‘God!’
The children stopped what they were doing and looked up, stunned. Across the other side of the kitchen, a knife fell from the magnetic block to the stone floor with a metallic clatter. Rose shuddered and blinked. Then, thinking quickly, she pulled herself together and clapped her hands.