by Rachel Hore
‘You’ve met Kate, haven’t you, Meredith?’
‘Yeah, hiiii,’ the woman drawled, looking Kate up and down. Suddenly the chinos and jacket she thought she’d looked perfectly nice in that morning felt depressingly high street next to Meredith’s designer outfit. Kate fought desperately for something to say. She tried, ‘How long is it you’ve known Ted?’ but this only caused a frown of impatience to pass over Meredith’s perfect features.
Just at that moment Liz appeared in the kitchen doorway, her shock of red curls escaping from their slide, her bracelets jangling, a tray of coffee in her hands. ‘Will one of you guys take this?’ she yelled. Ted, as lanky as his brother Laurence but more smartly dressed, broke away from a group of earnest fellow bankers, hurried over and relieved her of her burden. As he brought the tray round to offer Meredith coffee, he was nearly knocked flying by Sam.
‘Mummy, Daddy, Charlie did throw my mask and Daisy pushed me.’ Sam’s chubby face was streaked with tears. Simon knelt down and cuddled him. ‘Come up, Daddy. Tell them be good,’ Sam ordered, so Simon lifted him up, smiled apologetically at Meredith and Kate and went, Spiderman’s grubby arms tight round his neck. Meredith smiled politely at Kate, nodded and moved away to join the bankers.
I’ve been dismissed, Kate thought, feeling put out. She turned away, only to meet Liz emerging again from the back door with another tray – just two mugs on it this time.
‘Now, darling, that’s everyone fed and watered and frankly I’m done in. Let’s take this and find a seat, shall we? I’m sorry, I haven’t talked to you all day – well, you know how it is with parties.’
They sat down at a little garden table. Liz reached over a bejewelled hand and rubbed Kate’s arm. ‘What are you up to then, pussycat? You’ve been looking sort of faraway today. What mouse are you after?’
They laughed at the old joke. Liz and Kate had known one another at York University, but Kate had always imagined she wasn’t extrovert enough for Liz, never appreciating that her tendency to daydream gave her a mysterious allure. It wasn’t until they met up again at the same antenatal classes in Hammersmith that their friendship had grown, over strenuous breathing exercises and bouts of helpless laughter at their ridiculous whale-like state.
‘If I’m a cat then you’re – I don’t know – a lioness or a bird of paradise,’ laughed Kate now, for Liz was exotic, larger than life with a voice that was made for hailing taxis. Some people were terrified of her. She often spoke out loud the thoughts they only dared think. But Kate had learned that this alarming characteristic was tempered by large doses of tactful good humour.
As they drank their coffee Liz had constantly to disappear to say goodbye to people or sort out problems, and it was a while before they got back together again.
As the last of the other guests filtered out, Simon joined the two of them and they sat round the table, jackets pulled tight against the early evening air. It was starting to get dark but the children didn’t mind. They shrieked and sang as they played on the little climbing frame, Kate getting up and down every now and then to rescue Sam or Charlie. Laurence emerged from the kitchen with a pot of tea and pulled up another chair. ‘Bit chilly out here now. Shall we get the kids in, in a moment?’
Kate took a deep breath before there could be another interruption. ‘Wait. We’ve got something to tell you,’ she said, studying Liz and Laurence. She reached for Simon’s hand next to her. He clasped it hard.
‘You’re not in pig again, are you?’ gasped Liz. ‘I warn you, having three is no joke. You just can’t get round ‘em all. Look at my grey hair.’ She shook her perfectly red mane at an unsympathetic audience.
‘Liz, “in pig” is a revolting phrase.’ Kate laughed, though Sam and Daisy were a bit like roly-poly piglets sometimes. ‘And no, I’m not having another baby. It’s just, you know we were thinking about moving house? Well, we’ve decided—’
‘We’re moving out of London,’ Simon broke in. ‘We had the estate agents round yesterday. The house goes on the market at the end of the week.’
There was silence, then a wail from Liz. ‘What do you mean, out of London? Where out of London?’
Kate looked at Simon for encouragement. ‘Suffolk,’ she said, wincing at another wail from Liz.
‘Phew!’ Laurence stretched out his long body in the chair and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘That’s sudden. We thought you’d just come south of the river. Where in Suffolk?’
Kate managed to get out, ‘Fernley. Halesworth. Where Simon’s mum lives.’
‘But that’s miles away,’ shrieked Liz. ‘Practically in the North Sea. You can’t do that!’
‘Didn’t we meet up with you there once?’ said Laurence. ‘Southwold, with the lighthouse in the town?’
‘That’s right,’ said Simon. ‘You borrowed that cottage, I remember. Yes, It’s near Southwold but not so touristy where Mother is – and the tourists only come in the summer anyway. The rest of the year it’s very wild. Halesworth’s a nice little place, and Norwich and Ipswich aren’t far.’
‘Kate, that’s awful. I mean why, for goodness sake?’
Kate had braced herself for this reaction, but still the force of her friend’s distress cut through her. Liz was one of people she’d miss most.
‘We’re just tired of it all, Liz,’ she said quietly. ‘Of working all the time. Not seeing the children. Not seeing each other. Hearing the planes and the Fulham Palace Road practically going past our bedroom window all night.’
‘And it would be great to have a proper garden for the kids,’ Simon added.
‘But all your friends are here,’ Liz objected. ‘And what about the theatres, the exhibitions – everything, really? The country’s for holidays. Come on, you’re city people, like us.’
‘We’re not, actually, Liz. Simon was brought up in the country and I’ve lived all over the place. But the point is, we’re stretched to breaking point here. So we’ve decided, we don’t want to be part of the ratrace any more. We want to spend more time as a family. Surely you can see that.’
‘But why so far away? It’s so drastic.’
‘Liz, it’s Suffolk, not Mars,’ Simon joked.
‘What’ll you do about your work, Simon? You can still commute, can’t you?’ Laurence, as ever, was more phlegmatic.
‘I’ll take the train up from Diss,’ Simon said. ‘It’s very quick now – an hour and a half – and I can walk to the office from Liverpool Street. I’ve talked to Nigel, remember him?’ Nigel was a burly corporate financier who had come to supper once when Liz and Laurence were there, and he’d talked about share issues and the German Eurobond market all evening. Kate had practically slid under the table with boredom. ‘His wife Janice has left him, poor sod,’ (fed up with the German Eurobonds, Kate imagined) ‘so he’s rattling about in that big Docklands flat on his own. Says I can crash with him a night or two a week if the journey gets a bit much. And I can work on the train, of course. Take my laptop.’
‘But you’re going to look for something local, aren’t you?’ Kate prompted him. This was one of the areas she had worried about most in their plans. Simon seemed reluctant to commit himself to changing his working life in any way. She couldn’t blame him. Downsizing to finance-manager level in Suffolk would mean a big pay cut, to say nothing of the loss of his place on the ladder.
‘Once we’re settled, I can look around,’ was all he said now, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘Kate’s got plans, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, when the children are used to it and we’ve got somewhere proper to live.’
‘Where are you going to live?’ asked Liz.
‘We don’t know yet,’ Kate admitted and Liz’s eyes widened. ‘We’ll look when we get there, but we’re going to stay with Simon’s mother for a bit.’ When they had broached their moving plans with Joyce she had insisted upon this. And she had adamantly refused the offer of rent, agreeing only to a regular contribution to the housekeeping.
‘We’ll be fine,’ she said now. ‘Joyce is happy to have us. There are only three bedrooms, but it’ll do us until we find somewhere of our own.’
‘We’ll miss you.’
‘We need a change, Liz, we really do.’ Kate fiddled with her half-empty cup and it tottered, spilling over the table. They watched it spread and drip through the slats. Laurence dropped a tea-towel on it. ‘Sorry. Typical. I’m getting so stressed with everything. It’s all right for you, you seem to feed off it, Liz – the pressure, I mean. But I’m different from you. I need a more peaceful life, time to think, watch the grass grow. I don’t know why I came to London in the first place really – just that everybody did, you know, and I followed the herd. Because I studied English then everyone said, “Yes, BBC, publishing, teaching, for you.” And the publicity secretary job was the one I happened to get. I just got on the treadmill and I’ve never got off. It’s been fun – I’ve loved it, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got other skills, I know I have, and this will be a chance to find out what they are.’
Kate gazed round at her audience. Liz was nodding her head, slowly. ‘Maybe I can train to be a teacher,’ she went on, ‘or I might turn out to be good at gardening or running a business. And I’ll make it fit in with the kids, this time.’ Explaining it all to them suddenly made it all seem real. Anything was possible. ‘And I can always do some freelance work for Jansen and Hicks to start off with, just to keep my hand in. Don’t want my little brain to rot, do I?’
Liz smiled. ‘Maybe you can write something for the magazine,’ she suggested. ‘How about a column – Life Amongst the Turnips, with a shot of you in dungarees like Felicity Kendal in The Good Life?’
‘Oh shut up, you!’
‘I always wondered how they paid for everything, Tom and Barbara.’ Laurence said. ‘Didn’t have children to think of, I suppose. What are you doing about schools, by the way?’
‘We went round a couple when we stayed with my mother at half-term,’ Simon answered. ‘The village school at Fernley and the bigger one one at Halesworth can both shoehorn Daisy in for September, but Sam wouldn’t be able to start until Easter at Halesworth. Fernley primary school’s a bit small, but we loved it.’
‘It’s very sweet,’ Kate agreed. ‘Just eighty children, and it’s near Joyce and the teachers seem so committed. After that, the kids go to Halesworth for secondary school.’
‘The buildings are a bit crumbly, that’s the only thing I worry about,’ said Simon.
‘But Halesworth is further away and the other children there won’t be so local, Simon . . .’
Kate caught Liz’s eye. Her friend looked as though she was about to say something, but stopped. ‘Yes, well,’ Kate went on, a little defensively, ‘we haven’t quite sorted out some of the details yet, but we’re getting there. I feel so much better about everything now we’ve decided to go. It’ll be a fresh start for us all. And it’ll help Joyce, too. She’s still so lonely without Simon’s dad.’
‘Funny reason to move, to make your mother-in-law happy.’
‘Oh, don’t twist things, Liz. Come on. It’ll be a new direction. And I can be with the children all the time. They’ll be brought up in the country. It’ll be fantastic. And we can get a lovely house, an old house with a big garden – think about it! And we could have animals. Joyce has got a dog – we could get one, too.’
Daisy had wandered over and was leaning against her father’s knee. ‘And ponies. Dad, you said we could go riding or get a pony,’ she said excitedly.
‘Two ponies,’ Simon said wickedly, tweaking her hair. ‘And a Shetland for Granny.’ Daisy giggled at the thought of the dignified Joyce on a little fat Thelwell pony.
‘And you can all come and stay with us, can’t you?’ Kate squeezed Liz’s arm. ‘In our dream house.’
But Liz wasn’t yet to be bought. ‘Have you told your parents yet?’
Kate’s face went blank. ‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘They’re away in Spain. We’re seeing them next weekend. I’m simply dreading it.’
Chapter 4
‘I don’t know which I fear more,’ Kate confessed to Simon, as they sat in a traffic jam the following Sunday, on their way to lunch with Kate’s parents in Surrey. ‘Them being really really upset that we’re moving so far away, depriving them of their grandchildren, or them being too wrapped up in themselves to care at all.’
‘Whatever, I just want to get this over with,’ grumbled Simon, who felt perpetually on edge in the company of his in-laws. ‘Sam, give Daisy back her toy, for goodness sake, and stop squabbling, you two,’ he shouted into the child-view mirror. Kate reached round to help restore property and peace. ‘Damn these roadworks.’ Simon smacked the steering wheel and, as if at a signal, the vehicles in front began slowly to move again.
‘At least when we get a place of our own it should be big enough for them to visit,’ said Kate, as the car gathered speed and made it through the workmen’s green light, just in time. ‘Maybe they’ll be more relaxed then. They could come for Christmas. Just think, real old-fashioned country Christmases in our country home!’
‘Yes, it’ll be their turn to sit in the motorway traffic,’ muttered Simon, but Kate pretended not to hear. Her mind was drifting back.
‘There’s no place like home.‘ Even nowadays, when she watched The Wizard of Oz with Sam and Daisy, snuggled up on the sofa, Kate always mouthed the words with Judy Garland, tears in her eyes, just as there had been when she first saw the film as a lonely twelve year old at boarding school.
I’ve never really had a proper home, she thought to herself now. In truth, her family had always moved around. Her father had been in the army, stationed first in Hong Kong then, briefly, West Germany, before several stints in the Middle East sandwiched with short periods in the South of England. Sometimes they had lived in officers’ family accommodation, at other times, as in West Germany, the Carters had rented a furnished house near the barracks. In the Middle East, they had to live in a compound with the rest of the ex-pat families. Kate remembered always living with other people’s furniture, other people’s choice of décor. Often, her mother did not bother to unpack all their toys, ornaments and books – all the personal things that made a house into a home. What was the point? It would all have to be packed up again before too long so they could move on to the next place.
At one stage, during a visit back to England, her parents had bought a house in Kent as an investment and to make sure they had somewhere to call home when Major Carter’s career in the forces was over. They rarely lived in this Sevenoaks house during subsequent visits, because it was leased out to tenants most of the time.
At the age of eleven, Kate and her thirteen-year-old sister Nicola were dispatched to boarding school in Sussex, usually flying out to join their parents in the holidays, wherever they were, and spending many half-terms or the occasional free weekend with their paternal grandmother in her small terraced house in Hastings. The girls had loved those brief holidays by the seaside. Old Mrs Carter, their only surviving grandparent, had been ailing even then, but she was warm and caring, especially towards Kate, and she wrote regularly to the girls at school and sent them little presents. She had died just before Kate met Simon and Kate still missed her.
Major Carter retired from active service in 1984, when the girls were eighteen and sixteen and he still had a good ten years’ working life in him. Nicola went off to Cambridge. The girls’ holidays were now spent in the Sevenoaks house, which badly needed renovation after years of tenants had made their mark, and Desmond Carter got on the train to London every weekday morning to go to a desk job in the Ministry of Defence. His particular experience in the Middle Ea
st made him a valuable consultant and he quickly became absorbed in his job, often working long hours. But then came the tragedy of Nicola’s death and everybody’s life was turned upside down. It wasn’t long afterwards that the Carters sold the Sevenoaks house they had waited so many years to call home but which was now tainted with tragedy. It was while they were packing up to move that Kate’s father drove her up to York where, still dazed with grief, she was due to read English at university. Never again did she call her parents’ house ‘home’.
Simon had turned off the main road now and they were following a winding back route that took them to Epsom High Street, then up a long hill lined with large detached houses to the Downs.
Barbara and Desmond Carter now lived in a Charles Church mock-Tudor development by Epsom Downs station. One of the three spare bedrooms stood cold and empty, the second, the guest room, briefly Kate’s bedroom during holidays from university, was hardly used. The boxroom held Des’s golf clubs, his regimental memorabilia and his car magazines, none of which Barbara liked cluttering up downstairs.
The car slowed down as they passed the golf course where Desmond played regularly. Barbara kept herself to herself, walking the couple’s two miniature long-haired daschunds on the Downs, playing the occasional hand of bridge with some other forces wives locally and driving into Epsom when she fancied a wander round the shopping centre or a visit to the hairdresser. To Kate it seemed an immensely depressing life, but she recognized it was all her parents, still bound up with grief, seemed able to manage.
Simon swung the car into the Carters’ housing estate. They were twenty minutes late and Kate felt the usual miasma of misery descend. They passed a dozen ideal homes with immaculate front gardens, the dads washing their cars or tending the lawns and, as the Hutchinsons’ Audi rolled onto the drive beside the Carters’ polished black Rover, Kate saw Barbara’s pale face waiting anxiously at the window, saw her turn to call Desmond, and the front door open. The family marched up the path with red tulips standing to attention on either side.