Green Grass

by Raffaella Barker

  Inigo turns off the motorway and dark descends suddenly around them.

  ‘When will we be there, Dad?’ shouts Fred, his voice raised too loud because he cannot gauge it with his music blasting in his ears.

  ‘Another hour,’ Inigo answers, not hoping or expecting that Fred will hear him. He glances at Laura, but cannot see if she is awake in the soft dimness. He sighs and accelerates through the night towards Norfolk.

  Laura had never expected that Norfolk, so much a part of her childhood, would become an important place to her again in her life. If she had thought about it at all, she would have imagined that her uncle’s house, Crumbly Hall, would be sold when he died, and the place where she had spent her school summer holidays would become no more than a memory. She and Hedley both left for America before they were twenty, never thinking of looking back. Fifteen years later, Peter Sale died aged eighty-five and Hedley came back, leaving his university teaching in America, to live at Crumbly and run the small farm there. He thought he would just do it for a year or two. An outdoor life on the north Norfolk coast seemed a bleak prospect for a newly divorced academic, but the change of pace was what he needed, and life lived according to the seasons suited him, and even soothed him as he struggled through the aftermath of his marriage. After four years at Crumbly, Hedley recognised that he would stay, and that he loved it now in a way he could never have imagined loving a place. Only Inigo’s lack of enthusiasm stops Laura visiting him there more often.

  Hedley sees the headlights approaching along the drive, swooping up and down, raking spindly branches with their gleam then diving down into ruts and potholes. He hovers inside the front door, not wanting to appear overeager by going out to greet them, but unable to return to the sitting room where Tamsin is watching an unsuitable film.

  ‘There’s no such thing as unsuitable,’ she snarled at him earlier, when he tried to suggest changing channels to the programme on the fruit flies and their habits. ‘And anyway,’ she added, having watched five stony minutes of the nature programme, ‘your fruit flies are having sex and God knows what else. I don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on as far as suitable goes.’

  Hopping from foot to foot in the hall, attended by Diver, the Labrador, Hedley empathises with the dog’s single-note whining, and can almost believe that his own ears, like Diver’s, are cocked towards the door. He wouldn’t be surprised to find himself drooling. It is lonely here in Norfolk with only a taciturn teenager and a devoted dog for company. Hedley never envisaged himself as a single man, but since his failed affair with a neighbour, he has been on his own, and quite honestly, he can’t imagine anything changing now. Reflecting that it is time he got out more and spent some time with adults instead of pandering to Tamsin and complaining to Diver, Hedley opens the door to his sister and her family.

  ‘Inigo, Laura. Lovely to see you. Come in, come in.’

  Laura hugs her brother, breathing deep as she steps away, loving the woodsmoke in the air, the hint of wet dog and the determined wafts of sweetness from a winter flowering jasmine scrambling up and over a plant stand in front of the fireplace in the hall.

  ‘Hello, Hedley. It’s lovely to be back. I’d forgotten how much I love the smell here, and it never changes.’ Laura smiles, taking off her coat and walking through towards the kitchen.

  Inigo, behind her with a bag of groceries, mutters, ‘I hope you bought some wine, Laura. Hedley never has anything decent to drink here, and I could do with something now.’

  Hedley stays to greet Fred and Dolly, jumping back as if scalded when he puts his hands out to hug Dolly and encounters a slice of midriff complete with a diamanté tattoo below her belly button which reads STIFF.

  God, she’s becoming one too, he thinks despairingly. And last time I saw her she had plaits and still liked damming streams in the wood.

  Dolly, chewing gum, her headphones dangling around her neck, dribbling a tune, gives him a long, expressionless look which makes Hedley want to shrivel to the size of a screwed-up pocket handkerchief.

  ‘Hello, Uncle Hedley,’ she says in the same lobotomised monotone with which Tamsin addresses him.

  ‘Tamsin’s in there.’ Hedley points to the sitting room. Dolly spits her gum into the palm of her hand and throws it into the jasmine plant pot before vanishing into the sitting room. Hedley turns to Fred, braced for more of the same treatment, and is unnerved to find his nephew giving him a friendly smile as he crouches to stroke Diver.

  ‘Hi, Uncle Hedley,’ he says cheerily. ‘Diver’s looking well.’

  ‘Yeeess,’ says Hedley slowly, staring at him, fascinated by his civility, slowly warming beneath the uncritical expression on Fred’s face. ‘In fact, he’s just become a father. I’ve been up at a friend’s house looking at the puppies this evening,’

  ‘NO!’ bellows Inigo, who has removed his jacket to reveal a snug green polo-neck in very soft, lightweight fleece material which reveals every bulge of his biceps and chest and makes him look as if he has just been beamed into the dimly lit medieval hall at Crumbly from Planet Zog. ‘On no account are you to take Fred to look at those puppies, Hedley. I will not have it.’ Inigo paces about the room brushing invisible hairs off his sleeves and glancing venomously at Diver. ‘They’ll all shed hair like that one there. How can you stand it, Hedley?’

  Hedley ignores this, recognising it as Inigo’s usual combative arrival. He will settle down when he has had a drink, but until then will prowl and scowl and find fault. Rather like a dog arriving at another dog’s house, Hedley thinks, amused.

  Fred assumes a hurt expression. ‘Dad, I hadn’t even asked to see them, I hadn’t even said one single word. I don’t even know what kind of dog the mother is …’

  In the kitchen, Laura leans against the Aga, enjoying the massaging effect its warmth has on her back. This Aga has been part of her life since she and Hedley first came here aged thirteen, dispatched from Cambridge by parents turned tight-lipped by the incessant volume of music and the ceaseless litany invoked by Laura and Hedley which scarcely varied from, ‘I’m bored, when will you stop working and take us somewhere?’

  Michael and Anne Sale, both immersed in academic research and uninterested in entertaining their children, sent them to Michael’s half-brother in rural Norfolk. At the station they made a show of pretending to smile bravely, but in fact they were beaming in relief as they kissed their offspring and waved them off on the train, shouting down the platform, ‘Make sure Peter notices that you’ve arrived, and always offer to help.’ Then the pair of them returned to the library and their papers, the burden of the children a weight lifted now for ten weeks.

  As their teenage status demanded, Laura and Hedley sulked as far as the first change on the train, but then they looked at each other and simultaneously grinned.

  ‘We’re having a new life now,’ Laura whispered.

  ‘We can do what we like,’ agreed Hedley.

  Laura cannot forget her first sighting of the house. And every time she comes back, no matter what the time of day or year, or the state of her mind, the first moment of seeing it gives the same lift to her spirits. It was a swooning July day, with flooding sunlight spilling across the fields and hedgerows as they drove from the station. Bumping down the drive, grey flint walls and mullioned windows reflecting wisps of cloud became visible through the dense foliage of the avenue of lime trees. And then the sea. Laura gasped as she saw its denim blue stretching beyond the house, seeming to be on top of it, but in fact separated from the gardens by a mile or more of marshland.

  Uncle Peter must have been there with them, but Laura cannot recall him ever dispensing discipline or even food. Indeed, only vast effort and the assistance of a curling old photograph on the kitchen mantelpiece conjures his face for her at all, although she remembers his tall gaunt figure, leaning on a stick, his dog at his heels, gazing out across the early morning sea.

  The mumbling kitchen radio bleeps the hour, and Laura pulls herself away from the Aga. Some raw
potatoes have been left suggestively in a saucepan on the side. Laura pushes the pan across to the hot plate and reaches the photograph down. Peter was a mild man, an academic like Laura’s father although he had chosen botany rather than history. Sixty-three when Laura and Hedley first went to stay with him, he had never married. His passion was reserved for bird and plant life, and for walking on the marshes beyond his garden, where he would spend all day weaving through the maze of silver-laced creeks with the certain step of one who has known every ditch and treacherous drain all his life.

  From the beginning, Peter left the children to do as they pleased, and in doing so gave them his house to love. They explored every corner and cupboard, sneezing dust motes off old stacked books and clothes, bringing life and youth and new layers of chaos into the neglected rooms. Making it their own. Even now, Laura opens cupboards in the kitchen and knows what is in them with more certainty than she does in her parents’ house. At Crumbly she and Hedley ran their own lives, ate what they wanted to when they wanted to, and acted out every adolescent whim they could there. Filling the kettle now, Laura remembers turning the kitchen sink scarlet with Crazy Colour hair dye when she re-fashioned Hedley’s schoolboy quiff into a Mohican for a punk party in the village hall.

  The windows glisten with steam as the potatoes boil and Laura doesn’t notice them burn at the bottom. She was so happy here in her teens, able to be herself, not pretending to be an academic like her parents and Hedley. It must be good for Tamsin growing up here; on behalf of her own children, Laura envies her.

  ‘Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving.’ Inigo marches in, swinging a bottle of wine. He opens it, pours glasses for himself, Hedley and Laura, then stands fidgeting and ostentatiously looking at his watch to draw more attention to the lateness of supper. Despite his passion for cooking, Inigo never interferes in the kitchen at Crumbly. It’s too medieval for him; doing anything culinary in the cavernous space makes him feel like a vassal, not a chef.

  Laura feels like that all the time, but doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning. She drains the potatoes, ignoring the eager faces of Fred and Hedley hovering keenly like the Labrador Diver. She remembers her teenage culinary attempts at Crumbly. The meals were experimental and infrequent; at thirteen her cooking repertoire consisted largely of boiled eggs and cakes she liked to marble pink, purple and green with the small bottles of evil-looking food colouring the Crumbly village shop supplied. It has to be said, it hasn’t increased much. The chicken pie she is placing on the table came out of Hedley’s freezer ready cooked, and that’s how Laura likes it. She calls Dolly and Tamsin through to supper, and everyone sits down at the long oak kitchen table.

  ‘It’s so nice to be back here,’ Laura says, raising her glass to Hedley. He smiles, relaxing now the arrival is over.

  ‘Cheers,’ he says, slopping wine as he chinks his glass against Fred’s water tumbler, and then Dolly’s before reaching across the table to Inigo and Tamsin and his sister.

  Home with their parents in Cambridge had seemed small, the rules petty and the city hard, grey and implacable after Laura and Hedley’s summers in Norfolk, where the days were their own and the horizons stretched forever with no rules or boundaries to get in the way.

  ‘Do you remember how awful it was going back to school after the summers here?’ Laura asks Hedley, when everyone has got their food and is eating. ‘And how we begged Mum and Dad until they let us come for Christmas, and it was the year there was that incredible snow.’ Laura’s eyes shine; she has her elbows on the table, leaning towards Hedley, who is looking puzzled. ‘You must remember,’ she urges. ‘We went on a tractor to see the Sex Pistols play in Cromer.’

  Dolly and Tamsin are drooped over their plates, shoulders hunched, hair flopping forwards to make two curtains, one rusty red, the other matt brown like stout. Dolly toys with a pea, but not keenly enough to put it into her mouth. Like Tamsin, her body language indicates torpor and boredom. However, when the girls hear the word ‘sex’, they both suddenly sit up, push their hair away from their faces and with pleased expressions begin to eat the chicken pie.

  ‘Cool,’ says Fred. ‘Did they sing “God save the Queen”?’

  ‘I saw them on Rock Dinosaurs,’ says Dolly. ‘Mum, did you get the dead one’s autograph?’ she asks, back to her usual animated self now.

  Tamsin struggles to retain her sense of separation. ‘The Sex Pistols are really rank,’ she hisses. Hedley roars with laughter.

  ‘That’s exactly what they are, or rather were – you’re so right,’ he beams. ‘And Uncle Peter thought so too. He had to wait through the whole evening inside the Town Hall where the gig was, because it would have taken too long to get home and then come back for us again.’

  ‘I can’t think why he didn’t go to a pub,’ muses Laura. ‘But then—’

  ‘I think we’re all past caring now, aren’t we?’ says Inigo sulkily, and Tamsin, with her radar sense for discord, looks at him and then at Laura with interest. Laura sighs, and the sigh becomes a yawn and then another sigh as if she is meditating. She gets up to break the pattern and clears the plates away.

  Inigo carefully removes his hand from the neck of the wine bottle he has been clasping. He has positioned the corkscrew so it is poised like a ballerina on the rim. But before anyone can exclaim at his brilliance, Laura reaches across past him for Fred’s plate and knocks the corkscrew flying.

  ‘Mum,’ hisses Dolly. ‘Dad had to think his way into that and you just knocked it down.’

  Laura swallows her impatience ruefully, recognising that it is best to maintain an equilibrium even though every sense rails against it. She gives an apologetic half-smile, but Inigo just grins.

  ‘Don’t worry, I can do it again.’

  Hedley has been preoccupied for the past few minutes; then his brow clears. ‘Oh, I’ve got it!’ he exclaims. ‘The drilling starts tomorrow, there are trees to plant, and we’ve also got some men with ferrets coming. You’ll like that, Fred, I think, won’t you?’

  ‘Ferrets, great,’ says Fred, pushing back his chair and feeding most of his chicken pie to Diver.

  ‘Not ferrets,’ groans Inigo at the same moment. ‘Honestly, Hedley, I don’t know why you put yourself through all these charades. Drilling your fields, irrigating the crops, planting endless trees, worrying about rabbits. What is the point?’ The twins and Tamsin, eyeing Hedley and Inigo scornfully, slide out from their places and troop back towards the television. Laura wishes they would stay and talk, but cannot see any reason why they should.

  Hedley interrupts Inigo. ‘You’re a fine one to ask “What is the point?”. Your work wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny with that as a criterion, would it? I mean, what a waste of bloody energy to go poncing around the world making bloody paper chains. I don’t see the point of contemporary art. It doesn’t make you think – in fact it’s an excuse not to.’

  Inigo ignores this unhelpful interruption and continues, ‘You may as well accept that your role as a farmer is non-existent. What you are is a custodian of a small part of Norfolk. One day you will be bought by a rich Japanese businessman who will pay you a salary in order that he can come and take photographs of you going through the motions of farming. That’s about as good as it will ever get, and that, I guarantee, is the future.’

  Hedley pours wine into his and Inigo’s glasses and looks at his brother-in-law with mild dislike, adjusting his look, when he remembers Inigo isn’t technically his brother-in-law, to one of stronger disdain.

  ‘I don’t see why you can’t accept that there is a valid existence to be had in rural England,’ he says, determinedly keeping his tone well modulated and reasonable, as Laura has instructed him to do in his dealings with Tamsin, but is unable to resist a provocative little jibe at the end: ‘And I haven’t heard your defence for your way of life either,’ he adds.

  Inigo’s eyes glitter and Laura isn’t sure if it’s the wine or the success of Hedley’s baiting.

  ‘I don’t
have to defend contemporary art,’ he says loftily. ‘Art has always been pilloried by philistines and it always will be. That doesn’t ever stop the creative process. No artist will be put down by detractors.’

  Hedley is astonished and quietly amused. ‘I must say, Inigo, you are quite something. I don’t know when I was last called a philistine – I’m a bloody Classics professor, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start this one you two,’ Laura says wearily. ‘You sound like Laurel and Hardy, you really do.’

  ‘It beats your saunter down Memory Lane,’ says Inigo defiantly, sounding so like a spoilt toddler that Laura wants to slap him. Inigo in giant baby mode is maddening, and unfortunately it is one of his most frequently adopted poses. Look at him now, bottom lip out, scowling as he pushes the debris of supper away from his place setting, where he has assembled a handful of candles, removed from the many candelabra placed around the hall. Lighting the first one he warms the base of the next until the wax is tacky and receptive, then presses the lit wick of the first into it, and so on until he has one long candle. Laura keeps her head turned towards her brother, ostensibly discussing Tamsin, but she can see Inigo out of the corner of her eye, and has to close her eyes and take several deep breaths, which she exhales in a ribbon, to stop exasperation spilling over within her. Thank God some of the yoga has sunk in.

  Gathering her thoughts to the internal rhythm of ‘I must focus on Tamsin, I must focus on Tamsin,’ Laura makes her cupped hands into blinkers and leans towards Hedley. ‘Tell me properly what’s been happening,’ she says.

  Wrestling with the corkscrew and another bottle of wine, which Inigo, with a patronising smile, removes from him and opens, Hedley explains.