It was, frankly, a relief to be away from home, because everywhere he turned the house was full of memories. It felt like a home with the heart torn out. How they’d poured love into that house! For the first four months of their life together they’d lived in a nondescript property on the edge of Farmleigh, in a cul-de-sac just off the Aston road. (‘Ugh!’ said Anna. ‘I’m far too young for a bungalow!’) He’d rented it from the family of an elderly client, who had moved into a care home. The house was tired, the decor threadbare and the carpets swirly and unpleasantly full of cat hair that no amount of vacuuming seemed able to remove.
‘The garden’s the only thing that’s not stuck in the 1970s, and that’s because you look after it,’ said Anna.
‘It’s cheap and it’s ours,’ he replied, burying his face in her apple-scented hair. ‘I’d put up with a lot worse for that.’
To this day, he marvelled at their outrageously good fortune in finding each other. He’d been at work, trying to jazz up a tray of slightly bedraggled bedding plants on the trestle tables outside the garden centre on a perfect June day, when she’d driven up in her battered blue Morris Traveller. Absorbed in the task at hand and only dimly aware of the sound of a car, he hadn’t looked up until she was almost upon him. She stood, a slight figure in a lilac dress and a floppy off-white cotton hat shading her from the midsummer sun. The dress was sleeveless and her arms were peppered with freckles. She hovered with indecision, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, almost shimmering in the sunlight, it seemed to Theo.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to ask me?’ she said. Her smile revealed a slight gap between her front teeth. Tiny beads of sweat glistened on her upper lip.
‘Sorry! I was miles away,’ he stumbled, suddenly aware he’d been staring. ‘Can I help you, madam?’ he continued with exaggerated politeness, bowing slightly.
‘I think it’s just possible you could save my life,’ she said gravely, picking up his tone.
‘Oh? No pressure then.’ She was hovering again, he noticed, glancing anxiously back at her car. ‘You don’t look in imminent peril, if you don’t mind me saying. What exactly seems to be the problem? And how do you think I might be able to help?’
‘My normally rational friend is getting married on Saturday and she’s in serious danger of turning into Bridezilla. The florist has cancelled with two days’ notice and she’s distraught. I thought . . . well, I wondered if you could supply me with a dozen olive trees? You see, she’s Palestinian and I thought they’d make a statement.’
‘A dozen? By Saturday?’
‘There’s more . . .’ she said, looking down at her sandalled feet. The pink varnish on her toenails was chipped. ‘I don’t have much money. Is there any chance . . . any at all . . . that I could borrow them?’
‘Baby? Grandma? Shopping that might be melting?’
The shimmering girl looked up, flummoxed. ‘I’m sorry?’
Theo seized the advantage. ‘You keep looking at the car. I couldn’t help wondering what’s even more important than your friend’s wedding.’
The girl let out a great gurgle of laughter. ‘None of the above! It’s just Chuck. The trouble is that I can’t afford to get the lock fixed and I absolutely daren’t let him out of my sight. It’s more than my life’s worth.’
‘And who’s Chuck when he’s at home?’
She laughed again, and pinkened prettily. ‘I’d better introduce you. I must seem terribly rude.’
By the time Anna had returned, carrying not a dog, as he’d expected, but a cello (‘Chuck the cello . . . it’s my worst nightmare when I fly anywhere,’ she explained), Theo was already half in love with her. He rashly promised to find the trees – knowing it would probably mean a 5 a.m. dash to his supplier in Southampton tomorrow – and even agreed to let her hire them for a sum so paltry that it would barely cover his petrol.
And then, joy of joys, he discovered that Anna’s friend Nadia was marrying his cousin Tim, and he therefore had a cast-iron excuse to see her again. He didn’t let slip that he hadn’t been planning to go to the wedding. His mother, he knew, would be glad of his company. Any inconvenience his last-minute appearance might cause the family seemed trivial in comparison with the unthinkable prospect of letting her slip through his hands.
The wedding completed the spell she wove over him. He arrived, uncomfortable in a suit he’d pulled from his father’s wardrobe, and strained for a glimpse of her. Someone had arranged the olive trees to good effect: there were two in the church porch, two up near the altar, and the rest lined the aisles. Their simple terracotta pots were offset by plain white ribbons woven among the leaves.
When Theo couldn’t at first spot her he panicked briefly, then leapt with relief to the conclusion that she would appear with Nadia, as her bridesmaid. What he hadn’t anticipated was that Anna would play the bride into the church. He was so busy watching the door for the arrival of the bridal party that he overlooked her entirely until the very moment the music began. There were two violinists, and Anna on the cello. He had no idea what the piece was: only that it was beautiful, and she was its source.
To his delight she sought him out at the evening reception, after he’d packed his mother safely home in a taxi. ‘Thank you for the trees,’ she said shyly. ‘I think they worked, don’t you?’
‘I loved them,’ he said, unable to keep the smile from his face. ‘And it was good to hear Chuck in action.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She breathed out a deflated sigh, and plonked herself in the chair next to his.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, recovering herself. ‘It’s just all a bit of a mess.’ And she told him that the musicians in the church made up three-quarters of the Montague Quartet. Nadia, the viola player, was the fourth. They had met as students and for the last couple of years had enjoyed modest success touring and performing.
‘You may not have heard of us, but we’ve been on Radio Three a couple of times. And we’re pretty big in Eastern Europe, for some reason. But I’m leaving,’ she continued miserably. ‘It’s agony.’
‘Why are you leaving, if you love playing so much?’
‘How do you know I love playing?’
‘I was watching you,’ said Theo, realizing that he hadn’t taken his eyes off her for a single second of the service.
And Anna had explained that what had once been a happy relationship with Laurence (‘as in Montague, our glorious leader’) was in its death throes.
‘Why are you breaking up?’
‘Artistic differences.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Well, only if you think “artistic temperament” equals licence to cheat.’ She was teasing him again. ‘I found out he’s been playing the field as well as his fiddle. Again. And I’ve finally come to my senses and given him the elbow. But now he’s so angry with me that he never misses a chance to humiliate me during rehearsals, in public too if he can. It’s poisoning the quartet for everyone. We just can’t make music any more. So I’m out, but I’m scared stiff.’
All the time she was speaking, Anna was glancing in the direction of one of the other musicians, who was flirting with the prettier of the two bridesmaids.
‘That’s him? The good-looking git doing his best to charm the pants off the schoolgirl?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded unhappily.
‘So that’s why you’re over here with me? Because you’re trying to avoid your ex?’ asked Theo.
‘Only partly,’ she answered, blushing again as she had at the garden centre.
For a fraction of a second, Theo hesitated. I have nothing to lose but my pride, he thought. ‘Then let’s give Laurence bloody Montague a dose of his own medicine,’ he said, looking straight into her dark blue eyes. ‘Come and dance with me.’
And that was it. Six weeks later she moved into the bungalow with him, and by Christmas th
ey were married. They spent a cold but blissful week’s honeymoon in a damp cottage near Whitstable. Meanwhile Anna set herself up as a freelance musician: a combination of dashes up to London for orchestral session work, and peripatetic teaching in a handful of local schools. Helped by a small legacy from his aunt, they scraped together just enough money for a deposit on a house of their own.
They’d fallen on their feet with the Brew House. A narrow, dark-red brick building spread over three floors, it was tucked into a corner next to the old brewery, which had been abandoned a decade earlier and allowed to sink into dereliction. It was in the least attractive part of Farmleigh, next to a down-at-heel garage and an empty warehouse. But Anna, at least, had immediately seen the potential. True, the house had fallen into disrepair and smelled of hops, but it had good bones, she insisted, and someone had clearly once loved the garden. They put in as low an offer as they dared and to their surprise the harried estate agent practically bit their hands off.
There followed a year of intensive DIY: sanding and painting and repairing the Brew House, reclaiming the garden from the jungle of ground elder and brambles, until Anna, pregnant with Beth, finally admitted defeat and put her feet up. By then they had turned the ground floor into a single open-plan living space, with a kitchen one end and two squashy sofas the other. Upstairs they had a decent double bedroom, a serviceable nursery, and a bathroom.
By the time Anna was pregnant for the second time, Theo had transformed the top floor into another bedroom, and somehow squeezed their double bed up the narrow stairs into the space under the eaves, leaving the children the run of the floor below. They could lie in bed and look out of the skylight over the higgledy-piggledy roof lines of Farmleigh, which had come to life around them while they were almost too busy building their own nest to notice. An imaginative developer had bought the old brewery, and it now housed a trendy graphic design company on the top floor, and an art gallery and café on the middle and ground floors. The garage had been bulldozed and replaced by three new townhouses, and the warehouse behind them was being redeveloped as a community centre.
‘You’re smiling,’ said Catherine, walking alongside him. ‘Penny for them?’
The silent period had flashed by, he realized. They’d doubtless been walking through beautiful scenery, but he’d noticed none of it.
‘I’ve been gathering my thoughts, as instructed,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘It made me realize what a noisy world I live in. You know: work, children, radio, TV . . . I don’t know about you, but I felt very self-conscious to begin with. I’m not used to peace and quiet. It was like being in an assembly at school and being desperate to giggle. But then I got into it. I rather enjoyed the sensation.’
‘That’s what Anna used to say about running,’ said Theo. ‘She used to go out with her iPod and of course I assumed she was listening to music, maybe even learning a new piece she was working on. She admitted one day that she only took it so that if she met someone she knew, she could smile and wave, but have a cast-iron excuse not to talk. That surprised me, because she was such a social person.’
‘Do you know, that’s sort of what I was thinking about? That word gather. To begin with I kept seeing an image of Kate Winslet at that Hollywood bash a few years ago – do you remember? She got a lot of stick in the press for saying “gather, gather” when she was trying to get her emotions under control when she won an Oscar. But then I started thinking that Anna had gathered us all here today. That’s just what she was like. She gathered people around her.’
Theo smiled. ‘You’re absolutely right. She collected us. Waifs and strays. Me especially.’
‘You a stray? I find that hard to believe.’
‘Well, I was pretty lost when we met, you know. That’s what I was thinking about.’ And Theo found himself, hesitantly at first, telling Catherine an edited version of their meeting. The olive trees, and the wedding. The ex-boyfriend. How angry with life he had been at the time. How he’d dreamt for years of escaping Farmleigh, and had finally done so at the age of twenty-four, only to be summoned home from Africa a fortnight later to take over the family farm when his father dropped dead from a heart attack.
‘I still think he did it deliberately,’ he told her. ‘He couldn’t bear the fact that I’d actually escaped his clutches. Inflicting the farm on me was his revenge from the grave.’
He remembered the terrible phone call from his mother down a crackly line to the office in the compound, as the tropical rain beat noisily on the corrugated roof. He’d gone to Africa with such high hopes. Hopes of forging a new life, away from the vice-like grip of his father. Dreams of making a lasting difference, working with a small agricultural charity in south-western Kenya, although he’d immediately realized how much he had to learn before he would make a useful contribution. For now, the three years he’d spent at agricultural college and a lifetime farming Hampshire chalk-land might as well have been spent at catering college for all the use his know-how appeared to be in Nyanza.
Coming home felt like a total anti-climax, and yet more evidence of his uselessness. See? Couldn’t hack it in Africa, could you? whispered the voice of his dead father in his ear. It was as if he’d known how much Theo had struggled with the heat, the mosquitoes, the unfamiliar food. The whisper morphed into a sneer when, eighteen months later, Theo broke the news to his tearful mother that the farm must be sold. I always knew you’d let me down. You’re such a disappointment. All these years later she still blamed him for the decision, referring always to ‘losing’ the farm, as if it had been idle carelessness on Theo’s part, rather than an agonizing, gut-churning, desperate decision reached only after he’d exhausted every possible alternative.
It was Anna who turned the situation round. A few weeks into their relationship, just at the point of her moving in with him, torn between the need to expose the full ledger of his shortcomings to her and the certainty that once she learned the truth she would cast him aside, it all came pouring out. He catalogued his ineptitude, his guilt at forcing his mother to move away from the house she had called home for the past thirty years, his overwhelming sense of failure.
‘I can see it’s been hellish,’ Anna said carefully, having listened in silence to the litany of his failings. ‘Hell for your mother, but surely far worse for you. But have you ever thought that perhaps you did a brave and difficult thing, letting the farm go? Everyone knows what a tough gig farming is. Was calling time really so terrible? From where I’m standing, it looks as if you’ve got a job you love and are very good at. Why else has Mike made you his deputy manager? You’re using your skills and you still get to work outdoors. You look forward to going to work every morning. How many people do you think have that privilege?’
He told Catherine now, ‘Quite simply, Anna saved my life. I was the luckiest man alive, meeting her.’
‘I’d say she was pretty lucky to have you. You were well suited. The perfect couple, eh?’
‘No,’ said Theo, abruptly. ‘Never that. I let her down. Anna deserved better.’
13 miles
Beth
Beth woke early. The curtains in the hostel were thin, made from off-white cotton, and not quite wide enough to cover the window. All around her she could hear breathing. It was weird sharing a room with a load of other people. A dormitory, for God’s sake, like boarding school or something.
The last time she’d shared a bedroom was . . . at a sleepover when she was still in Year Eight? Or perhaps it was on that family holiday in Wales when she had to share a bunk bed with Sam? God, that was stressful. She’d lain awake half the night, listening to his noisy breathing. Every now and again it seemed to stop altogether, and just as she started to panic, there’d be a sudden snort, and she’d hear herself let out her own breath, a breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding. She’d relax for a moment, and then the exhausting cycle would start all over again. She could still conjure up the gritty-eyed tiredness of the days cooped up in the cott
age, playing board games as the rain fell relentlessly outside. The first night home, she’d almost wept with relief to be back in her own bedroom.
The girls’ dormitory was in two sections. At least she’d managed to manoeuvre herself into the smaller area, with Tamsin and the other women. On balance it was better to be in with the grown-ups. She’d really had enough of pretending to be interested in Chloe’s cheerleading team (the girl was obsessed; it was tragic). As for Lucy and Ella – she’d admit they’d all been friends at primary school, but puh-lease. Their preppy-good-girl act made her want to scream. It was probably their inescapable destiny, having Mary Anne as a mother, but they were so pretty, so perf, so vanilla that she just couldn’t stand it. Both sisters would witter on at great length about anything and everything – none of it of even the slightest interest – and it was all who was wearing what to the Prom, what some boy at their stupid posh school had or hadn’t said to someone else she didn’t know . . . Boring. Then – worse still – one of them would suddenly remember about Anna and nudge the other and then they’d both put on their concerned voices and ask if she was OK, and remind her that as her oldest friends they were there for her.
She’d changed in one of the outdoor washrooms, flung a fleece on top of her PJs, padded upstairs in her socks and climbed quickly up into a top bunk without anyone batting an eyelid, let alone expecting a full-on pyjama party. Round the corner, Lucy and Ella and Chloe were gasping over non-existent spots, scooping up their hair into top-knots and sharing their armoury of cleansing products. They’d probably spend half the night whispering about how Beth was coping. Actually, now she thought about it, they had bossy-boots Mary Anne for company, so that would cramp their style a bit.
Knowing Anna Page 3