The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘You’re not keen on alternative accommodation,’ Gerard said, and before she even said it he spread his hands again, as if absolving himself, a look across at Carswell again that said, I tried.

  ‘No,’ she said, and swallowed. ‘This is our home.’ She looked from door to window, gauging what it would take. To make it safe.

  He nodded. There was a pause. ‘We can give you a panic button, if that would make you feel more secure. Staying here.’

  And she saw it reflected in Carswell’s face, the flicker of excitement at her fear, the black gleam in his eyes of the outside, trying to get in.

  Chapter Nine

  Coming here had been a joint decision, of course it had. They’d talked about it.

  Mostly Fran had listened while he talked, with Emme under his arm on the sofa under the high vaulted space of their flat’s one lovely but impractical room, Emme playing with something but listening too, Fran could tell by the way she went still when he mentioned certain things. What they might do with the space, a playroom, a nursery, the attic space. He talked about Emme exploring in the fields, learning to swim in an old flooded quarry; he talked about the place as though he knew every inch of it. He talked about creeping out of the dismal cottage before dawn to go and lie in reed beds waiting for the ducks to rise, whispering to his little sister to keep quiet as she begged to come too.

  ‘You shot them?’ Emme’s voice uncertain. He just squeezed her against him absently, his eyes focused somewhere else. ‘The ducks, Daddy.’

  He smiled down, vaguely. ‘And then we went and lived in a magic house. We slept on the floor and we never washed and we cooked in the garden on a fire.’ Emme had settled back then, nodding, as if she knew exactly the place. ‘It was called Black Barn,’ he said. She’d shivered at the name and he’d smiled. ‘After a big barn there’d been behind the farmhouse, though it had burned down long since.’

  Had Fran said anything? She couldn’t remember now, she’d concentrated hard on seeing things through his eyes. That’s right: at one point she’d asked, Where’s the nearest station? For work? He’d stopped abruptly, impatient, she had watched him controlling it. Twenty minutes to the nearest station, but everything’s online, isn’t it? And if you go back to work, you might be travelling, London’s not the be-all, these days.

  The station was in fact more like forty minutes away but she didn’t find that out until they’d been there two months. Never mind the school, Nathan’s trump card, the village school that made her nostalgic for the place on the dangerous corner of their London street, with its screaming hordes and harassed teachers.

  It had happened more quickly than she had expected, that was all. One minute they were driving back to London and she was going over it all in her head, cloud-cities scudding in white light and the emptiness, the ghost-roar across the plain. And the next he was in the kitchen on his mobile phone, making an offer. Two days after they’d viewed it. She had been on her feet in the doorway open-mouthed when she heard, ‘So you’ll put it to the vendor?’

  Hanging up he had just smiled at her. ‘Come on,’ he said, easy.

  ‘It’s not set in stone, is it? We can pull out at any time.’

  Shrugging. ‘But the way the market is…’ She’d hesitated, then Emme, almost on cue, had tripped over a box of toys because they’d run out of space to store the stuff and begun to wail.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Right.’

  To judge by the number of For Sale boards in Oakenham and the villages, it turned out, the market wasn’t going anywhere fast, but by then they’d jumped, their boats had burned. And it meant they’d got the place cheap and just as well, now she wasn’t earning.

  She tried calling Jo the night before they left, a hot night in the almost empty flat and Emme perched on the bed watching a DVD because Nathan was out somewhere, farewell darts in a pub in Tufnell Park with a builder. ‘You’ve got to keep them on-side,’ he said in the doorway, a quick cool glance round the empty space. ‘It’s all about the contacts book.’ He’d had an energy about him since they’d come back from the viewing, heightened when contracts had been exchanged, a restlessness. The door had swung closed behind him even as she was saying, ‘Fine.’

  She’d told Jo, when the offer was accepted, over a stiff drink in a park somewhere, Emme in tow because she had been nervous and with good reason. Jo’s stare had been blank with incomprehension that looked like hostility. ‘I don’t know what makes you think that’s a good idea,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, where does that leave you? In the middle of nowhere. If it all goes tits up?’ And Fran had shrunk into herself at that because her only answer was, ‘It won’t.’

  Sitting among the boxes, the walls and shelves all bare, she listened to Jo’s number ring, on and on. There’d been no answer, and she’d hung up.

  The weather broke as the removal van’s rear door rattled down and they – Nathan and Fran with Emme under her arm – were forced abruptly inside, under sudden sheets of rain so heavy it blurred the horizon, the poplars, even the outline of the chicken barn. It was as though they had stepped through a waterfall and found themselves standing in a dank cave, among cardboard boxes.

  From the door Fran watched the driver run for his soaked seat, hunched under the downpour with his jacket pulled up at the neck and then the door banged behind him and he was off without a wave, the faded lettering on the shutter disappearing into the grey, and they were on their own. The kitchen smelled, of mildew, mouse and cooker grease. Overhead thunder cracked, astoundingly loud, and Emme, already shivering in the sudden chill, began to whimper. Fran had had to galvanise them then and there, to avert anything worse.

  ‘Your room first,’ she said to Emme, identifying a box of toys and clothing, pushing Emme ahead of her on the narrow back stairs. Below them Nathan stood, stock-still. She didn’t turn to ask him why, not now, not yet.

  She’d told him about Jo, late the night before, lying in bed under a crumpled sheet with all the noise outside still going on, just loosened up, blearier, drunker. Nathan, though, she could have sworn hadn’t drunk a drop despite having been out three hours, he came home jumpy with the same energy he’d gone with. He just made an impatient sound at the mention of Jo’s name, ‘Her,’ he said, contemptuous. ‘Well, to be honest, good riddance. If you ask me it’s people like her’s why we’re going.’ And he’d turned on his side.

  Unpacking Emme’s things, shaking the duvet out on the little bed under the big handsome sash window, she observed the rain gusting across the wide grey fields. And then, in a brief hiatus in the relentless rolling, cracking thunder, she’d heard an ominous trickle that rose to more like a running sound somewhere at the far end of the house, somewhere overhead. She went out of the room, along the corridor that tilted as if a big hand had just taken it and put a twist in it, at the top of the stairs she had to put her hands to the wall, disoriented by the slope of the boards. He was still standing there, where she’d left him.

  ‘Nathan?’ At the alarm in her voice he had turned, and smiled, and she felt the house settle, and stabilise, for the moment. She realised that she was thinking of it as floating, not rooted – or was it that the land wasn’t land? The rain would have to stop soon. ‘Can you hear that?’ she said, and he tilted to listen. ‘The roof,’ she said, and then he moved.

  He’d been hyper after that, moving from one end of the house to the other, turning out boxes in search of stuff, a particular pair of pliers, a stepladder, a torch. Emme had trailed in his wake for a while before retreating to her bed, pressed against the wall and rubbing the ragged ear of her yellow rabbit against her upper lip. As she stood in the doorway watching her Fran saw something move, down along the skirting, and she felt her breathing stutter. Emme’s eyes were on her. A spider? It was there, and then it was gone, under the bed on the dusty boards. Bigger than a spider should be but it scuttled, leggy.

  When she’d been a child spiders had made Fran hysterical, she could never have borne even to analyse what it was
about them that terrified her, although that swift motion, the many legs tapping up and down like hairy levers, was a lot of it. She had managed to switch the panic off but still it lurked, far back somewhere. Emme’s fear was, if anything, worse. There would be spiders in a place like this, of course there would.

  ‘You hungry?’ she said to Emme, so she would not look down. Emme shook her head just once, settling on the pillow, and the rabbit’s ear flopped, across the thumb in her mouth. Fran made herself cross the room, back to the bed, pulled her legs up under herself beside Emme and stroked her cheek. ‘Hot milk?’

  But even as Emme nodded yes her eyes were drooping closed and by the time Fran got back upstairs with the milk she’d been asleep, toppled on the pillow. As Fran eased the duvet out and over her she heard Nathan talking in a low voice downstairs.

  He was at the back door, blocking someone’s entry, but the visitor must have heard her come into the room because he moved to look over Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan stepped back, reluctantly, and the man took a step inside, ducking to pass under the lintel; his head gleamed bald, dark as a conker. His eyes were light-coloured in a creased brown face, he might have been forty or sixty, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘Mr Dearborn wants to put his pigs on our field,’ said Nathan, expressionless.

  Outside, the rain had stopped, but everything seemed to be dripping. The farmer stomped on the mat.

  ‘Alfred,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘They call me Fred.’ He smiled round the kitchen, benign. ‘Been a while since I was in here.’

  She could feel calluses on his palm, and his hand was warm. A farmer, then, but nothing like John Martin, who’d been in such a hurry to sell them the place; Martin who smelled of unwashed clothes, Martin with his weird dyed hair and his eyes that seemed to move independently of each other. If Dearborn smelled of anything it was the outside, chaff and hedges and diesel, he had a broad, lined friendly face.

  ‘Did you know Mr Martin, then?’ she asked, curious.

  ‘Ah, Johnny,’ said Dearborn, ruminative, looking into her face. ‘Not a man you get to know,’ and he laughed abruptly. ‘I been in his kitchen once or twice. He wasn’t keen on having me on his field, though. Anyway.’ He took a step back. ‘Didn’t know you was just arrived, you’ll need a day or two. Settle in.’

  ‘Pigs,’ said Nathan, sitting at the kitchen table after he’d gone, leaving that scent of fields behind him. The bottle of wine was nearly finished. ‘I told him I’d think about it. It’s money, I suppose.’ But he spoke lightly, not gloomy, looking up at her with a sudden smile. ‘Up in a minute.’

  And she needed sleep, anyway, she felt it descend abruptly, weighing her down. As she left the room he was lifting a box on to the table.

  Some time later, Nathan asleep beside her, Fran was woken by a sound that propelled her instantly out of bed. Her heart was going like a hammer. The sound came from along the corridor, a strained, high-pitched stream of breathless terrified nonsense. Fran knew immediately that it was Emme. Who else could it be? As she came through the door Fran could see her sitting bolt upright on the bed, moonlight on her face through the uncurtained window. The sky must have cleared: it was extraordinarily bright. Emme babbled on, unconscious, her eyes wide open, and Fran took her shoulders gently, set her face in front of Emme’s and then as she felt Fran’s hands, as her eyes settled black on Fran’s face, she screamed.

  No no, thought Fran. ‘Don’t, shhh.’ You’ll wake him, no.

  She put her arms around Emme on instinct – the room suddenly seemed to contract and narrow around the two of them on the little bed and on the periphery of her vision out to the side through the cool glass Fran felt more than saw the horizon, rippling away from them under the brilliant moon. Then as suddenly as it had come, whatever it was evaporated, and she felt Emme go limp in her arms. Gently Fran laid her back down on the pillow, but her round pale face was smoothed out, untroubled. She didn’t make a sound or a movement, not even when the boards creaked as Fran crept backwards to the door.

  When she got back to the bed she could see Nathan’s mounded back, he had turned on his side, away from her and the door, but his breathing was shallow and even, as if he hadn’t surfaced. For some time, though, Fran could feel her heart pattering on, agitated, asking itself questions: Is it here, is it this house, is it somewhere in the dark flat fields surrounding them, is there something wrong with this place?

  And answering. Nathan brought them here, her and his child, he wouldn’t have done that if it was a bad place.

  Would he?

  The next day she measured up every window and ordered curtains and blinds online in a plain heavy fabric, blackout-lined. They arrived ten days later and she hung them herself. Nathan was out when she put them up, he hadn’t told her where; he hadn’t been happy with the cost of the curtains, so she was relieved to be on her own doing it. And Emme had followed her from room to room, handing up the little plastic hooks and rings, gazing, nodding her approval.

  She had asked Emme that first morning if she remembered a bad dream and Emme had at first looked quite perfectly blank, but then she turned and ran silently away, up the stairs. When Fran caught up with her she was on her knees, looking under the bed. Fran had knelt beside her, but there was only dust under there, and Emme’s face beside hers, tilted down with tumbled hair, had looked perplexed, then tearful. ‘Dreams aren’t real,’ Fran had told her, pulling her on to her knee.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ Emme had said.

  That first week before the curtains arrived, Fran had moved through the house with determination, sweeping and hoovering and putting stuff away while Nathan hummed and whistled, coming in and out, jumping in the car on mysterious errands.

  ‘Where is it this time?’ she said, trying to sound cheerful about it when he got up from the breakfast table for the third morning in a row, putting on his good jacket and reaching for his briefcase. ‘Appointment with an architectural practice in Chatteris,’ he said promptly. ‘Shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours. Though I might stop in at Homebase on the way back. Anything you want?’

  She couldn’t find a reason to complain, or at least not without sounding as if she was nagging: he would even call in at the supermarket for her, without asking, bringing home cardboard boxes full of dried goods, beans and pasta, canned tomatoes, as if the end of the world was approaching, as if they were stocking a bunker.

  ‘I don’t mind doing the supermarket shop, actually,’ she said to him after a week or so, itching to get out. ‘I’d quite like the change.’

  He had raised his eyebrows. ‘Didn’t have you down as a Stepford wife,’ he said, indulgent. ‘Sure. Sure.’ But they only had one car, and he did seem to need it most days, taking it upon himself now to tell her why – setting up contacts or visiting premises, a drink with Rob in Oakenham – so not much changed, in the end. And when she did find herself in the supermarket with Emme she only felt slightly hysterical and slightly foolish at having made the fuss.

  Home alone, she moved through the rooms, trying to get to grips with the farmer’s DIY, flimsy boarded up corners and disconcerting plywood cupboards jammed in, painted orange. Prising one open beside a fireplace in the room she had decided would have to be the guest room (a big one opposite theirs, looking out over the road with a long sash window and panelled shutters painted shut), she found a figurine on its side, made of painted china, a shepherdess with a crook. It might have been one of those things old ladies have on their mantelpiece only the shepherdess had big breasts, she leaned forward provocatively and one hand was on an exposed nipple. Fran had dropped it quickly into the black refuse sack she’d brought upstairs. At the end of the day with Emme asleep and supper laid, Nathan at the table and in a good mood she went and got the bag, thinking it would make him laugh, or something.

  Even as she got it out, seeing the leery tackiness of it she thought, no, actually maybe not, a prickle at the back of her neck but it was too late by then. He set down his knife
and fork, and grunted. ‘Nice,’ he said, cold.

  She had stuffed it back inside, hot with shame. He thought it was some kind of come-on. Hauled it all the way out to the wheelie bin in the yard before coming to sit back down, cheeks burning. Nathan was eating again, as if nothing had happened.

  Finding himself some office space put Nathan in a good mood. ‘It’s on a new development,’ he said, jubilant, arm on the dusty mantelpiece like a lord of the manor. Emme had gazed up at him, mute, waiting for him to praise the work they’d done all day (just as Fran was waiting for him to find fault). ‘Nice and compact, just room for me, maybe a secretary if things take off.’

  ‘I could do that,’ she’d offered quickly, and he’d looked at her, thoughtful.

  ‘Really?’ he said, lightly, dubious. ‘I mean, sure. Once Emme’s settled, maybe. I thought you might want to work from home.’ She had been taken aback that he had made assumptions, had formed plans he hadn’t talked to her about.

  After that he was out of the house more or less every day – I’m paying for the office, after all – climbing cheerfully into the car, home again at five thirty, smelling of handwash and new carpets where Fran could only detect mildew and bleach on herself.

  She’d been pondering her options when Nathan had said to her one evening, ‘Oakenham’s nice, actually.’ Giving her a sidelong glance and she realised, to her shame, that she’d almost been waiting for his permission. It wasn’t as if he wanted to keep her at home, was it? ‘Emme’d like it. Feed the ducks, there’s swings, all new, not the lethal old stuff we played on, and there’s a good butcher. Some great old houses.’

  Something about the way he said it prompted her. ‘Is that where it was? You told me. A house by the river, the summer. That summer, when you squatted.’