The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  Without the girls, he has to admit he is lonely. Exhausting though it is to be a parent, Stella and Rosie never fail to amuse and without them the bleakness of his new life is intolerable. Though he can’t afford it, he stomps out every evening to go to the pub in Shipcott, a mile away. Tiny and smoky, it has a log fire and a bar and serves a limited menu of home-made food and (blessedly) hand-cut chips instead of the vile frozen kind. There’s a darts board, which draws in custom, and best of all no bloody music. Quentin has always loved pubs, but it’s not the beer so much as the atmosphere of the true pub which he likes: the informality, the freedom to talk or be silent, the absence of feminine fripperies and the presence of masculine simplicity. In addition to beer, the Shipcott Arms also does a decent house red.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says aloud.

  There’s only one other customer there, a thin, raggedy old man wearing a hat, with a black dog at his feet. A tramp? Quentin sees the man looking at him, and on impulse raises his glass.

  ‘What’ll you have?’

  Surprised, the tramp considers. The publican stops polishing his glasses, opens his mouth, then carries on.

  ‘Same as you. Thanks.’

  His voice is low, with a faint Devon burr to it, and his grin very white. A Traveller, maybe, Quentin thinks, but they get chatting about this and that, and he finds him surprisingly bright and sharp. The tramp asks if he’d like a game of darts, which they both enjoy, and then have another round of drinks. This time, to his surprise, the tramp pays. After that, Quentin looks out for the tramp and is always pleased to see him.

  ‘What do you do here, mostly?’ Quentin asks him once.

  ‘Plant trees,’ said the man. ‘Or cut them down. You?’

  ‘At the moment, gardening.’

  Quentin needs the company. There is a critical number of enemies that a person can make before their career self-destructs. He very much fears this to be the case with himself. His dread of permanent exile is the worst thing. It isn’t just the money, it’s the stimulation and companionship of his former colleagues, for if journalism is now one of the professions most despised after banking and politics, with its fair share of rogues, cowards and liars, it also attracts the bravest, brightest and least boring of every generation.

  I have failed at everything, he thinks: career, marriage, fatherhood.

  ‘If I could go back in time, I would,’ he blurted out to his mother on one of his visits. Even though she is exhausted by looking after Hugh, she will at least listen, unlike anyone else in his life. ‘It wasn’t perfect, but there were happy times, and I didn’t realise it.’

  ‘People never do,’ she said. ‘But you need to start looking forward, not back.’

  ‘I know – I know – I know.’

  Each day, he can feel himself slipping deeper into the place from which there is no return, and part of his despair is that Lottie ascribes a deliberate malice to his every action which, as far as he is concerned, is not there. He has said some nasty things (as has she) but he is no more in control over his actions and emotions than anyone else: yet she thinks he must be. Everything is his fault, including electrical cut-outs in a thunderstorm. She doesn’t realise that, stuck in this dismal place, he is exerting every ounce of willpower just to remember who and what he is.

  ‘All men are only half-good you know,’ he had said to her. ‘Our mothers try to civilise us, but we need another woman to do the rest.’

  ‘Why should it be up to us to do that? Why can’t you do it for yourselves?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  However, the miserable truth is that he can’t become that better person. He lacks both the will and the ability. It’s just like when he had graduated, stuffed as full of what he’d learnt as a goose intended for foie gras: only to find that in the rest of the world, nobody cared. All he had to fall back on was his energy and his wits. They had served him well, and in due course he had obtained everything most people desire – a home, a wife, a family, a career which seemed to surge upwards as powerfully as a leaping salmon. Then it was all useless again.

  But it isn’t only my fault, he reminds himself. She rejected me first.

  ‘Oh why are you so stupid?’ had been a phrase she had said so many times that it no longer wounded. Lottie has clearly forgotten how often she had turned on him, snarling at his domestic incompetence at everything, from changing a nappy to hanging up laundry. And then there was the complete loss of interest in him after each baby, which for all he knew at the time might have gone on for ever. A horrifying number of his male friends have, he’s discovered, turned out to be in completely sexless marriages. They share a home and a bed but absolutely nothing physical, because their wives or partners have made it clear that they are out of bounds, for ever.

  Why should anyone put up with that? You might as well be buried alive.

  Quentin pushes his spade down savagely. He has dug over and planted a good deal of the vegetable garden at Home Farm now, and something about the mindless exertion this involves, the bending and stretching and careful extraction of weeds, absorbs some of his frustration and improves his digestion. (The girls no longer flinch when he breathes on them.) He had found an old-fashioned spade in the woodshed, the kind whose blade is shaped like the point of a stylised heart, and a fork. Their steel slices through the soil, and the more he works it, the easier it becomes. It’s less boring than he thought it would be, thanks to a warm spell. Spikes of wild daffodil on the bank beyond thicken into bud. A wall glitters with snowdrops, and galaxies of yellow celandines.

  The ground is riddled with life. Every forkful uncovers the plump ends of worms, frantic to burrow away from the light.

  How many finger their way blindly through existence? Everyone is wriggling through the darkness, until dragged up into the glare of the light. Quentin stabs deeper into the ground. The hot pull on his arms and legs and stomach will ache later on, but it is the only way he can keep guilt, grief, anger and fear at bay. Sometimes he finds himself sobbing as he uproots another clump of buttercups. If he lives here much longer he really will lose his mind.

  The compost bins at the bottom of the garden are what he visits every day. Presumably, they were installed by Randall, who it is also clear had looked after the garden in his time. Each mound steams with energy, and each has been invaded by glossy weeds: bramble, ivy, primrose, periwinkle. It looks like a bit of William Morris wallpaper, complete with a thrush hopping about.

  He plunges his spade in deep. At once a jarring feeling goes up his arms as it strikes something large. A stone? He works his spade around it, carefully, trying to lever it out. It feels less heavy than the usual lump of granite, and the compost grips as if reluctant to release its treasure. Eventually, it comes out with a loud squelching sound, a round, brown object. An old football? Oddly heavy, with some straggling growth half attached, it comes with a reek that turns his stomach.

  Sometimes, just before an accident, you know that something dreadful is about to happen, unstoppably. Quentin picks the round thing up, vaguely glad to be wearing gardening gloves, and sees what he’s holding.

  It is a severed head.

  For a few moments, he sees things he wishes he hadn’t: the eyes pitted into sockets, the empty hole for a nose, black lips that curl away from grinning teeth. A long worm threads itself in and out of the jaws. He knows at once whose head this is, and he also knows that he must bury it again with all possible speed. He doesn’t care if he’s breaking the law. What good would alerting the police to its presence do to anyone – least of all the head’s owner, Oliver Randall?

  Though some scraps of leathery skin remain, it’s more skull than head. Some kind of beard is attached to the lower jaw, and then he’s emptying the contents of his stomach into the compost, retching and heaving to one side as the head lands, with a soft thud, in the clods of leaves, grass cuttings and ash. If Lottie or the girls, or the police find out then the house and garden will be overrun with photographers, journalists, gawkers
– there’ll be no end to it.

  The hole he’s made is three feet deep, but he makes it deeper yet. The sense of urgency is almost overwhelming. Even though nobody is in the house, he keeps his back to it, turning every now and again to check that no one has come, then returning to his task in a frenzy. He feels as guilty as if he’d murdered the former tenant himself.

  Poor sod, Quentin thinks, and the wave of disgust that follows his nausea is not something he’s proud of either. To cut off a human head … the place where thought and feeling, personality and reason were contained – to render it lifeless. He’d never thought before how cruel and vile an act it was, for it looks as if it wasn’t a clean sweep, the way you imagine it would be with a guillotine. Somebody had hacked at it … How could it have been missed before? The police must have searched the scene of the crime pretty thoroughly, but somehow they had. Perhaps the other smells in the compost had misled the dogs, or perhaps they had not looked hard enough.

  Was the hole deep enough to escape the attentions of vermin? He has no idea. Six feet is the traditional depth, but he stops at five, as far as he can tell, the sweat drying cold on his shaking body as he piles fresh compost over it.

  Who had buried it like this? Had it been dragged here by a fox or badger, or had somebody placed it there? The latter, he thinks. It must have been the murderer. But why not bury the whole body in that case? It was such a crazy thing to do, crazier, even, than a beheading.

  Now is not the time to be public-spirited. None of his family knows what he does about Home Farm, but he can just imagine what that knowledge will do to his daughters, his vulnerable, innocent daughters whom he has already hurt so badly. That he himself will be haunted by it, he has no doubt, but it would be worse for Stella and Rosie.

  Any parent, if offered the choice between being woken relentlessly every night by terrified small children, and breaking the law, will choose the latter.

  For the first time he feels real fear about where they have chosen to live. Chopping off someone’s head suggested hatred of a kind he can’t begin to imagine. Yet there was a horrid logic to dismemberment, because it made the crime harder to detect. Maybe the rest of the body was going to be cut up and dispersed – he’s heard of cases like that. No matter, he isn’t going to think about it.

  ‘I dread to think what will happen to Stella and Rosie if they stay down here,’ he tells his mother. ‘They’re far too bright for a village school.’

  ‘You worry too much about their future,’ his mother tells him.

  ‘I want the best for my daughters.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure that what you want, and what they need, are one and the same.’

  The more he plods around in between deadlines, the more he broods on Randall. Why would he have been attacked during the one period of the year when normal life went into hibernation? Did that make it more or less likely to be someone who knew him? More likely, Quentin thinks, given how many people go away at Christmas. Besides, who would bother to come down the long lane to Home Farm unless they knew a particular person would be at the other end of it? You’d have to know the area well to come off the B-road, and how many people do that?

  Every time he gets out the maul to split logs, he thinks of it, the heavy blade coming down on the frail human neck, the hot fountain of blood. Whoever attacked Randall must have been drenched. Though what better place to get away with murder than darkest Devon, where anything could be burnt or buried?

  ‘Oh, yes, dreadful business,’ said Sam the postman when Quentin mentioned it.

  ‘Didn’t you find the body?’

  ‘I did, unfortunately.’ Sam, normally so ruddy and cheery, looked quite pale at the memory. ‘I thought it was a funny bit of a tree at first. Then I saw, and I couldn’t get away fast enough.’

  ‘We still get the odd bit of mail for him, catalogues for women’s clothes. Did he have a girlfriend?’

  ‘Never saw one.’

  ‘Maybe he was a cross-dresser.’

  Sam laughed. ‘You never know with people, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  No wonder he has become a regular at the Shipcott Arms. The publican, a magnificently moustachioed man called Mike, has confided his own story, pleased to find a new audience for it. Ten years ago, he’d had a partner who inherited a cottage near Bideford, ‘little better than a ruin’. Mike, being handy, had restored it over the years with his own money, with the intention that he, she and their two kids should live there one day. Room by room, the cottage was made good: replastered, replumbed, rewired, redecorated. He’d laboured over every window and fitting.

  ‘It was the sweetest place you ever saw by the time I finished,’ he said. ‘I put my heart and soul into it, even planted a red rose over the front door. It was my dream home.’

  Then, one day, he had returned to find all his possessions in plastic bags and the locks changed. There was a general murmur of sympathy at this point. His partner had met another man online, and Mike was left with nothing.

  ‘If we’d been married, I’d have got half the house, but I didn’t think of it,’ he said. ‘You always believe, don’t you, a marriage is for women, but it isn’t so. I have no rights whatsoever. She got the lot, I have no home to call my own, and I can’t even see my kids.’

  All the men shook their heads, agreeing that it was cruel and unjust. Only Quentin wondered why, if his kids meant so much to him, he hadn’t thought to marry their mother.

  The one good thing that has come out of his own marriage is the children. They are, despite the occasional tantrums and fights, continually surprising and surprisingly delightful. He never minds cooking for them, or reading to them, or getting them to and from school, and this is strange because even though he’d tried to be kind to Xan, he had never really cared for children before they came along. It dawns on him that love is like genius: not, as he has always been led to believe, a matter of inspiration but of perspiration.

  He would never have guessed that he would be happier lying in bed with his daughters than with any woman. They are reading A Hundred and One Dalmatians.

  ‘I do like Pongo,’ says Rosie. ‘He’s just like you, Daddy.’

  ‘Missus is just as brave, though,’ says Stella. ‘She’s not as strong as Pongo, but she still risks her life for the puppies.’

  ‘Every parent would do that,’ Quentin says.

  ‘Would you, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Downstairs, something cracks like a pistol shot, and they all jump. Quentin’s mind leaps to possibilities, each worse than the last, before realising it’s a log in the wood-burner.

  ‘There are a lot of spooky noises in this house, Daddy.’

  ‘Yes, but they’re natural noises,’ he says, as if he too had not for a moment been paralysed by fright.

  Does Lottie know about the murder? Sometimes he thinks she must do, and sometimes he thinks she can’t. He certainly isn’t going to tell her. What would be the point? Still: lightning doesn’t strike twice, and in the pub the consensus is that it must have been gypsies.

  ‘They’re always at the bottom of everything bad,’ said one old-timer. ‘Whenever they come near, stuff gets nicked.’

  ‘Better not let Mr Tore hear you say that,’ said Mike. ‘You know his ma was a pikey?’

  ‘Ah. But she gave up being a Traveller when she met her boss, didn’t she?’

  ‘Some say she was given that job and the gatekeeper’s cottage because Tore’s his child.’

  ‘Didn’t Tore get some girl pregnant round here himself?’ Quentin asked.

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s a sad story,’ said the old-timer. ‘Anyway, he won’t hear a word against gypsies. He lets them camp on his land when they pass by – the real Travellers, that is.’

  ‘Gypsies may be thieves, but they’re not killers,’ said a heavily tattooed man everyone called Jeff. He lived in a hidden house that was said to have been dug out of a hill, worked installing solar panels and had
a voice so deep that nobody would dare tangle with him. ‘They’re a much-misunderstood people, if you ask me. Besides, the police interviewed every gypsy for miles around, didn’t find a thing.’

  ‘Hell’s Angels, then?’

  Jeff snorted. ‘They’re only interested in their bikes. If Randall had been into drugs, I’d say it might have been a deal gone wrong.’

  ‘Behind this lies a bitter mind,’ said the publican. ‘I bet you there’s a woman involved.’

  ‘No, it’s a lunatic or an Islamic fundamentalist. Either way, not from round here.’

  That was the main thing.

  One night, the wind blows three slates off the kitchen roof, which leaks copiously. The Tores send round a handyman to fix a sheet of plastic over the hole until the weather improves.

  ‘I’m going to ask the Tores if we can have a Velux window put there instead.’

  ‘But what’s the point, Lottie? It isn’t our house.’

  ‘We’re still living here for another seven months. I can’t stand being in the dark. It won’t need planning permission, and it’d bring lots of daylight in where we need it most.’

  ‘What possible difference can it make to this shithole?’

  Quentin writes,

  The English have made such a fetish of country life that they believe it to be the Heaven to which all good Englishmen and women should aspire, where the sun always shines, and your vegetable patch isn’t devastated by rabbits. At least one can eat rabbits. If things get much worse, I may be trying fricassee of slug …

  Spring arrives in spurts and streaks, as if something is leaking. It feels like recovering from a long illness, and in fact no sooner does winter retreat than he goes down with flu.

  ‘Don’t expect any sympathy,’ Lottie says.

  ‘I’m really nod well.’

  ‘Take paracetamol, and drink lots of tea.’

  The worst of it is, she’s landed a job working with Beardy Martin in Trelorn. There’s some big building project he’s involved in, and Lottie’s been hired on a salary of £35,000 a year – a respectable income here. He can’t help being stung by envy, and she is even more impatient with his shortcomings.