The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  Quentin shrugs. He feels almost jealous of his own son. Nothing seems to bother Naomi. When he’d asked if the water she drank was from the mains, she’d answered, ‘No, it’s from the well. It’s perfectly clean, you know – newts live there.’

  He repeats this to his father, and the two of them laugh together, for the first time in years. Then Hugh stops, and Quentin sees the terror in his eyes.

  Hugh says, ‘She used to be so beautiful, you know. Your mother.’

  ‘I know,’ he answered, though he feels angry at the way Hugh implies she is at fault for getting old, as if it isn’t the case with everyone alive. At least his father has had his mother nurse him in his old age. Meanwhile, he himself has nobody.

  The affair with Tina has fizzled out quite abruptly. He arrived unannounced at her houseboat, and discovered another man in her bedroom wearing only a short purple terry towelling dressing gown, a gold medallion, and socks. This is Roger, a name that has cropped up with increasing frequency since Christmas.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tina said, without a trace of compunction; ‘but you wouldn’t take a hint.’

  Quentin left without a word. It was nothing, after all: just sex and somewhere to stay when he came up to London. What horrified him most was that his replacement was so old. He keeps being shocked at parties by how haggard, fat, wrinkled and bald his contemporaries have become, and yet it’s just the effect of having been away in America; presumably they think the same of him. He returned to Devon as soon as his ticket allowed, and sat in his car in the cindery Exeter car park, the harsh, tingling sound of the tracks vibrating in his ears like eldritch laughter.

  Hugh drifts off to sleep, and Quentin, sunk in gloom, sits for a while. The Bredins’ Staffie snores loudly on his patchwork cushion in front of the fire, stinking; Naomi is having it put down next week, as it has dementia. He’s surrounded by the old and dying. Sometimes he thinks that all the energy of his ambition has its source in the desperation his parents’ home, and country life, evokes in him.

  Next door, Naomi is singing along with Ladysmith. She still loves South Africa; every August, when the agapanthus bloom, she’s sad.

  ‘She wouldn’t give up,’ Hugh says, suddenly.

  ‘Wouldn’t give up what?’

  ‘Us.’ Hugh closes his eyes for a moment. ‘Ask Lottie to forgive you.’

  It takes a moment to realise what his father is saying, and then Quentin feels pure rage. The old hypocrite! Don’t do as I do, do as I say.

  ‘Fa, it’s not possible to do that.’

  ‘Marriage is … work.’

  ‘Even if I wanted to, Lottie wouldn’t.’

  Many years ago, Hugh had written a poem called ‘Ground Elder’, about the way you can never eradicate mistakes. It had been one of his better efforts, though like too much of his writing it depended on botanising.

  ‘Ch … ch …’

  What is Hugh trying to say? Or was he snoring?

  ‘I think he needs to rest, now,’ Naomi says. She fluffs up the pillows around Hugh’s head.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Anne will be here soon. She’s going to set up a new driver for painkillers.’

  Quentin shudders. Pills and intravenous tubes are as common as meals. It feels as if Hugh’s cancer has devoured all their lives.

  ‘You’re very brave, Ma.’

  ‘Just practical.’

  At that moment, a soft voice calls,

  ‘Halloo? All right if I come in?’

  A woman with cropped hair enters. She looks vaguely familiar.

  ‘Oh, Anne, hello. This is my son.’

  ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘Have we?’

  Quentin’s mobile rings. It’s Lottie.

  ‘I need you to get back at once.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter? Is it the girls?’

  Lottie says, ‘I have to leave. My mother has had an accident.’

  22

  Born Lucky

  Xan and his mother are driving to London. It’s very different from when he made the reverse journey in the car nine months ago. His spots have gone, he has some money in his bank account, and he has a girlfriend.

  The biggest change, however, is that he now has offers from five choices of university.

  Even when he was summoned to UCL he told nobody other than his stepfather.

  ‘Um. If you’re going to see Hugh and Naomi, is there a chance I might get a lift to Exeter?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got an interview in London. Don’t tell Mum.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I’ll probably fail.’

  Quentin didn’t tell him off, but said, ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.’

  The whole day had been weird. Back in academia, but also back in London. The paper he was asked to write was practical criticism, and it was a hideous effort to get his brain working again. But one of the passages was Donne’s ‘The Flea’, which he had just read in Hugh’s copy, and thought about. He spent so long agonising that he’d only written three pages, but they were, he thought, three good pages, about marriage, parasitism and the unexpected. After many months of stupefaction and idleness, he can think again.

  The teenage brain, Bron had told him, sheds many of its connections as a tree sheds twigs in order to grow to maturity. Xan was alarmed by this, fearing loss of something essential and alive. Now he understands that he needs this shedding. It’s not about getting a degree or doing the right conventional thing by his education and parenting. University is what he wants and needs to become his true self, from which nothing can be taken.

  As Quentin predicted, his interviewers were interested in his experience of working in a factory. They discussed Down and Out in Paris and London, and having recently read it at Hugh’s suggestion, he managed to remember enough not to sound completely at sea. He even managed to make his interviewers laugh. All the same, when the offer arrived, he was astonished.

  ‘It’s the best university in the country,’ Lottie said.

  ‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

  ‘No. Look it up. The people who went to the Bartlett, like Martin, were far better taught than I, and they worked far harder.’

  Xan rolled his eyes.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘Because it didn’t cross my mind to suggest that you apply there when we were in London.’

  Despite her anxiety over Oma, Lottie does seem a lot happier. Is it just the work, or Martin? He wouldn’t blame her, even if Beardy strikes him as a bit wet. It’d make her feel less bad about his philandering stepfather, and be one in the eye for him too.

  At times, Xan almost feels sorry for Quentin. You can become addicted to bad feelings, as to any other stimulant, and he wouldn’t have got his offer without Quentin’s insistence and assistance.

  ‘I hope I’ve made the right decision,’ he tells Lottie. ‘About my offer, I mean.’

  She keeps her eyes on the road.

  ‘Xan, I can’t tell you what to do. There are no certainties in life. You thought that if you worked hard and got the marks, you were going to sail into Cambridge. I thought that if I worked hard and loved my husband and family, I was going to live happily ever after.’

  ‘But my expectations were formed by the system of education.’

  Lottie laughs.

  ‘And mine were formed by middle-class morality and fairy tales. What a surprise that they turn out not to be true! Maybe nobody gets what they believe should be theirs, but just getting a bit of it is worthwhile. Just a bit is more than most ever get.’

  He can’t suppress a throb of joy at his new prospects. What Katya’s reaction will be when he tells her he’ll be going away is another matter. They have never discussed any kind of a future together, only that she wants to stay in England.

  ‘You don’t want to go back to Poland?’

  ‘Why would I go back? Here, I have opportunity. Especially if I have a baby
.’

  She returned Xan’s appalled gaze. Katya let the silence grow between them, then grinned.

  ‘Is OK. A joke.’ She dug him in the ribs. ‘Alex, I do not want kids, not yet.’

  She understood about going back to look after his grandmother, and even approved of it (‘Is what Polish peoples do’), though Humbles had not. Even on a zero-hours contract, without any fixed hours, he was supposed to live in fear of losing the miserable wage they paid.

  ‘There may not be an opening when you return,’ he was warned.

  ‘I am allowed to take unpaid time off to look after a dependent,’ Xan said. He’d checked; it was true, but they still made up their own rules. Well, sod you, he thought. Even if he’d given half his earnings to his mother, he still has £600 saved up, and he loves his Oma. No way is he going to stay away from her when she needs him.

  It had been harder to leave his regular Saturday gig at the White Hart, right when the tourist season was getting going, but that job will at least be waiting for him. The regulars in the bar seem to like him, even if they do call him ‘a nice young black chap’, and don’t quite believe he’s English. Xan has learnt that breaking into Happy Birthday pays dividends, and asking couples in the restaurant if they have any special requests does too – even if he has to improvise a lot. There is an appetite for live music, and a number of enthusiastic bands around which play at pubs and local festivals, plus a good church choir in town. Tore isn’t the only professional musician tucked away nearby, either. If Trelorn does get a music academy, Xan thinks, there will be no shortage of people wanting to learn (or even teach) an instrument.

  All things considered, he is feeling pretty chilled about returning to London for a bit.

  Lottie, though, is losing it.

  ‘Marta should never be living in that house on her own.’

  ‘Mum, it’s only a broken leg!’

  ‘A broken leg isn’t a simple matter when you’re elderly.’

  She’s driving like a lunatic. Oma has never struck anyone as frail, quite the contrary, but how much of this is her force of character? It’s awful to think of her being vulnerable.

  ‘I knew she shouldn’t have that crazy dog, but she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘She’s not going to die from it, is she?’

  Lottie says, ‘Death is like a pane of glass. When you’re young, you don’t see it there; that’s why people your age toss their lives away and try dangerous things, because you can’t imagine that you will ever bump up against it. But now, I see the glass, and my mother’s breath is on it … She could die if she stays in hospital, they are terrible places now.’

  ‘Please, don’t get so German, Mum. We’ll be there soon, and she’ll be perfectly well looked after.’

  He rings Marta’s mobile.

  ‘Oma? It’s me.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lottie cries, almost swerving into a caravan. ‘She’s in hospital, she—’

  His grandmother’s voice comes into his ear, like a cricket chirping.

  ‘Darling, I am in mint condition.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Pah! Not so bad. I am in a ward with crazy people and the nurses spend all day talking to each other. I am anxious only for my Heidi.’

  ‘Give her my love,’ Lottie says tensely. ‘Tell her to GET A PRIVATE ROOM.’

  Xan does this, and Marta says,

  ‘Oh, not to worry darling, I am fine. Drive carefully. We do not need any more members of this family in hospital.’

  Xan conveys this to his mother; she slows down, fractionally. But soon the traffic thickens, and the Multipla is forced into a succession of crawling lanes anyway.

  ‘Are you going to see anyone in London?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  Now that he has his offers, he’s been able to look up mates on Facebook, and forgive them for not having been in touch. It’s strange to see the ones who took a proper gap year putting up posts from Thailand and Brazil. Their photographs of themselves in stubby striped hats and baggy shorts, stoned or draped round the necks of strangers, are absurd.

  Trelorn has been transformed by sunshine. Every house seems to fluff itself up in drier weather, like a bird, and the walls that were once a bedraggled grey are now white, cream and yellow. The Bed and Breakfast signs have an air of plausibility. People look brighter in the trickle of tourism: as his family have discovered, £50 a month extra is the difference between surviving and living. The turning point in the year has been reached.

  ‘It’s always the same with seasonal work, work till you drop all summer then try to keep body and soul together all winter,’ Maddy told Xan. Astoundingly, she has a job cleaning somebody’s holiday cottage, on top of her factory work. ‘As long as we don’t get another July and August like the last one.’

  ‘Or the one before,’ said one of her friends.

  ‘And the one before that!’

  They cackled under their filmy caps.

  In London, a sunny day is a bonus, but in the country it is critical. Without a decent summer, holidaymakers get an EasyJet flight to the Mediterranean, rather than staying at home.

  Whenever the sun shines in England, it’s the most beautiful country in the world, Xan thinks. The landscape is luminous, as if every blade of grass were lit from within. The skies are a deep, lustrous blue, and for miles around, larks evaporate into the skies on a thin sizzle of song. There are foxgloves in tall spires of speckled pink, and bluebells, and daisies as big as moons sprouting so fast you can almost see them grow. The earth and air pulse with energy, the birds seem drunk with joy.

  Even Home Farm feels different. Light streams in from the new kitchen windows, and all the rooms have been filled with colour. It’s strikingly different from their London home.

  ‘What happened to the tasteful taupes?’

  ‘Mud colours aren’t smart when you bring a ton of the real thing in on your boots,’ Stella said.

  Xan can’t help loving his sister for saying things like that. (When asked by the Vicar whom she would most like to meet in Heaven, Stella answered, ‘Darwin.’) Somehow, her precocity has become just another eccentricity, no more remarkable than any other. She’s still teaching herself French at night, and reads more than anyone in the school, but nobody is unkind to her about it, any more than they are to the kids with Asperger’s or specs, and so she has become less weird. She and Rosie spend most days galloping through the sloping field below Home Farm and pretending to eat fresh grass.

  ‘Couldn’t we just have the tiniest pony, like from Dartmoor?’ Rosie pleaded.

  ‘Those ponies still need feeding, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You did promise us a pet, and all we’ve got so far is McSquirter, and he’s no fun because of Xan,’ Stella reminded her parents.

  ‘Sorry,’ Xan said.

  ‘We’d rather have you than a kitten, but we’d like to have a kitten too,’ Rosie remarked.

  They’re the right age for country life. They don’t want to go drinking, dancing, clubbing and having sex. Now that the afternoons last a long time, they can walk themselves home from school.

  ‘I really don’t like them wandering around on their own.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Quentin said. ‘You can’t keep a child in cotton wool.’

  Even Xan thinks his mother’s anxiety is unnecessary. He’s seen enough of Lottie’s former colleagues to know that somehow, architects always look as if they inhabit a slightly different plane of experience to the rest of humanity – more structured, less cluttered and so on, which inevitably raises your levels of anxiety rather than decreases them, because people weren’t more structured and less cluttered, were they?

  The girls seem almost to have forgotten London, apart from it being where Oma lives. Even Stella seems to have made friends, especially with the local doctor’s daughter. The Viners are another pair of refugees from London; Josh, the GP, turns out to know some of Mum’s old crew, and his mother is one of Oma’s
best friends.

  ‘Small world, isn’t it?’ Lottie said when they discovered this.

  The web that connects so many adults still amazes Xan. It had taken him much of his childhood to understand how it underlies his parents’ life and how much they take it for granted. If they didn’t all go to the same schools and universities, they met through the myriad ways in which people have always connected even before the Internet. Does everybody ultimately know everybody else? If that were so, then he could find his father, assuming he is still alive. But without a name, how could he go about it?

  Yet somebody must have known it, because otherwise, how would he have turned up at a party full of graduates? He’d tried asking his mother where it had been, thinking that would be a start.

  ‘It was somewhere in the East End,’ she said. ‘I can’t even remember the street.’

  Could she really not remember, or was she lying? Lottie is a truthful person, but she is odd about some things, especially sex. All women are weird, really, and not just about spiders.

  He remembers Dawn’s odd words. Look at my blood. What did she mean? Did she mean that she thought he couldn’t see it when she was bleeding? Or maybe her mum doesn’t believe in doctors, like some of the other weird people he’s come across, like Lily Hart, who thinks the government is plotting against the people. Xan thinks of the way Janet brushes out her daughter’s long, fine blonde hair sometimes before leaving, as if she were a doll.

  ‘There we are my pretty,’ Janet says. ‘My little girl.’

  Only Dawn isn’t a little girl, she’s a teenager. He thinks again of the ladder of thin white scars he’s seen on her forearm, and wishes he knew what to do.

  ‘Mum, if someone asked you to look at their blood, what would you think they were saying?’

  ‘I’d think they were asking me to get it analysed. Why?’

  ‘Oh, just something somebody said to me. How much longer?’ Xan asks.

  ‘Three hours.’

  On and on they go, past the giant striding statue of a man, swamped by a hideous housing development, past Bristol’s wide, gleaming estuary, past fields where horses graze, and apple orchards, and signs to stately homes and other cities. Gradually, the great numinous clouds with their shining strangeness fall away. The sky and the land become brighter, flatter, more mundane. They stop at a service station, where there’s a confluence of tall thin people who are quite clearly from London, and their opposites, scoffing down pies that are all too familiar. Don’t touch them! Xan wants to say, but Humbles pies still smell pretty good when warmed up. Xan remembers the last time they were in a service station like this, and how Quentin hadn’t bought coffee for anyone but himself.