“What?” says Patrick, struggling upstairs with a ladder and another bucket.
“Roberta. And George. Playing the ‘Raindrop Sonata’.”
“I think that’s quite witty,” says Patrick.
Jane raises an eyebrow and sits down on a step outside her bedroom.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. It is bloody cheeky, can’t you see? A woman who we PAY to educate our son, teasing us. I am firing her. But first, I am calling the plumber. Along with, probably, half of North London.”
But as she brings out her phone, and looks at it, she sees a text from Jay. Her lover. Her neighbour. Her fantasy. Darling, we are going today. Brian and I. Can I possibly kiss you before I take my thighs into hell and back?
Oh, God. What a day to choose. Her stomach squirms. She taps a message back. Fuck off. Our house is about to collapse. We have water everywhere.
Patrick leaves the room with a brimming bucket.
Jane looks down at her phone, willing it to vibrate. After a minute, it does. Oh darling. Please don’t be cross. Come round.
She immediately replies. I must call the plumber. Can you wait?
He waits. Brian waits. They wait, with their bikes and their Lycra cycling gear packed, and their special shoes and their Michelin maps.
Roberta finishes the lesson early, because she is worried about getting home.
The rain eases off, turns itself into a familiar drizzle.
The tank, however, has not stopped. The entire upstairs floor is now impossible. Huge dark streaks line the walls. The ceiling drips ominously. The carpet is a marsh. Water has even penetrated the hall downstairs.
Jane puts a cashmere jumper on and collects her family together. She is distracted, but not so much that she can’t have a quick glance in the mirror, to check she looks elegantly dischevelled. Good, she thinks. She wants Jay to think she has been suffering, but not so much that she has lost control of her style.
“Darling? George,” she cries. “Tonight, we have been invited round to Jay and Harriet’s.”
“Well, that’s all very well but what about the plumber?” mutters Patrick.
“Someone is coming in two hours,” says Jane dramatically.
“Goodbye, then,” calls Roberta up from downstairs.
“What, what? Oh, bye Roberta. Sorry, I am a bit distracted,” yells Jane.
“No worries. No lesson next week, then?”
“What?” Damn these teachers, thinks Jane, as she runs downstairs, sweating lightly. Always needing organising and somehow… servicing in some way or other.
“Not coming next week?” she says to Roberta. Well why the hell not? I suspect she’s off to some bloody symposium on Chopin. Or a concert. Or a recital.
“Yes, isn’t George away?”
“What?”
“George. I think he’s at some form of Camp. Cub Camp?” Roberta offers gently.
Oh, Christ. The needs of her son. Bloody never ending. And now the piano teacher has remembered it and I have forgotten it. Showing me up again, bitch.
“Oh, yes, of course. Yes. Roberta, you have a better grasp of my diary than I do!” says Jane. “A fortnight’s time then. Marvellous. Thanks a lot. Lovely to hear the Raindrop piece. Very appropriate. Let’s hope we don’t need to segue into Britten.”
That’ll show her.
“What, ‘Noye’s Fludde’?”
“Well done. Roberta, there are no flies on you. See you in two weeks. Goodbye.”
Roberta walks off through the Square. She is glad to be away from Jane. She looks forward to having some time to herself. She thinks of all the things she can do in her allotment.
Jane notes the water tank has, at last, stopped. She shuts the door, leans against it. She can hear the ceiling upstairs drip fatly onto the carpet upstairs.
Suddenly, the face of her child appears at her elbow, a permanent reminder of her moral failings. She feels her life is a shambles.
This is not how adulthood was supposed to be, surely, with a child she does not understand, a husband who has transformed into someone she hardly knows, and a lover who reinforces the status quo.
Plus, a house which is falling apart, yet is so valuable she dare not sell it for fear of future profits squandered.
“Mother.”
“What, what George? Can’t you see I am rushing about?”
“No,” says George, logically. “I can see that you are leaning against the door. Now, can I ask you something?”
“What?” says Jane warily. “Is this a good time for questions?”
“I am going to Cub Camp next week, you know.”
“Yes, I have just remembered. Roberta reminded me.”
“And, well. The thing is this. Mother, I need to practise putting up my tent.”
Jane looks at her son.
“Do you have any idea of the things I have to organise at the moment? Do you? Do you?” she shouts at him.
“Mother, don’t shout.”
She gathers herself together.
“Sorry, sorry. Obviously you don’t have any idea, but yes, go on.”
“So I thought tonight might be a good night.”
“What for?”
“You know, to see if the tent is waterproof. And to get to know how to put it up. Think how much fun it would be to hear the rain outside and we are all dry inside.”
“Put up your tent? Tonight? In this house? All of us? Are you crazy?”
“Yes. I thought we all might put up the tent, and sleep in it. It’s a three man tent. And I don’t want to sleep in it all on my own anyway. At Cub Camp, I’ll have Finn.”
She looks at him, exasperated.
He steadily returns her gaze. Jane realises she envies him, his ability to be fundamentally in one situation at a time, not always torn, as she is, between one thing and the next. She is jealous of his sure footed position at the centre of his own small world, a world involving challenges and trials and goals which he is happy about attempting. She admires it, and wishes she could share his boundless optimism, in which every week is an excitement, and a gruesome but inexpensive experience such as Cub Camp a thing of joy.
“Please, mother. If we are going to Harriet’s perhaps we could do it in her garden.”
A wave of love comes over her for her son. Giving her approval is such a little thing.
And it would make her feel a bit less cross about Jay’s cycling holiday. If he can do that for Brian, then surely she can do this for George. But there you are, she thinks. I am letting George do it, but for the wrong reasons. I am letting him do it because my lover is doing something similar with his own child. Does this make it a worthless gesture? She doesn’t know. She wishes she was a better person. But then, she thinks, imagine what she would have had to jettison. All that sex.
“Mother,” comes the small insistence at her elbow.
Forget it, thinks Jane. Just concentrate on being in the moment.
“Alright. It’s mad, but we’ll try and do it. As long as Harriet says it’s alright.”
Then if there is a disaster, we can always sleep over there, she thinks, although even Jane’s formidable nature quails, slightly, at asking the wife of her lover for a favour.
George’s face is a picture of incredulous joy. He really had not thought his mother capable of giving her blessing to this plan. He rushes upstairs to collect the tent.
“And torches. Mother, we will need torches.”
And so it comes about that Jane, Patrick and George end up sleeping in George’s Cub tent, not in their own garden, but in the garden of Harriet and Jay, their neighbours. Jane gets there first.
“Hello,” she says to Jay on the doorstep of his house.
“Darling,” says Jay. He glances anxiously over his shoulder to check his wife isn’t in the vicinity, and then embraces her warmly, if swiftly.
“Come in. We must go, but come in.”
Jane stomps in.
“Patrick and George are on their way. The house is a nightmare. We ar
e going to have to leave the Square for at least a month. Where we will go, I do not know. Possibly my parents’ in Guildford. George wants us all to camp in your garden tonight. I agreed, partially because I feel guilty that I never do anything for him. And you are taking your son off for three weeks.”
“Eighteen days actually.”
“Well. Anyway. Our house is really hopeless at the moment, and I don’t dare to put the electricity back on. I know outside will be a sodden marshland, but do you think Harriet would mind?”
Jay looks at Jane, and suddenly bursts out laughing.
“My God! You! In a tent!”
She hates him.
“Yes, well I am not that hopeless, you know. I could say the same about you… on a bike.”
They look at one another, middle-aged lovers impaled on a trident of guilt and desire and duty, forced into costly adventuring for the sake of their children and from a notion, imbued on them probably by post-War parents, that things done out of doors, without a computer screen in attendance, are virtuous necessities.
Jane closes her eyes wearily.
“Alright, if you must know, I am steeling myself. It’s going to be ghastly.”
She opens her eyes and looks at Jay.
“If I had looked at myself twenty years on, after I moved here, all fired up and full of ambition, and young, I would be horrified to see how little I have managed to achieve. When will it all work out? When will it be easy?”
Jay strokes her cheek briefly.
“It never will,” he whispers. “That, my darling, is the joy of adulthood.”
Brian appears in the hall.
“Dad,” he says quietly.
“Sorry, sorry Jane, we must be on our way. Can’t miss the Eurostar.”
And they go, jaunty with their gleaming bicycles. Jane notices him looking around the front of the house, pointing out something to Brian.
She wonders vaguely why he is remarking on it to his son, passes through the house and sits down in the kitchen. Her lover’s kitchen. God, what a mess she has made of everything.
Eventually, Harriet gives them all a cup of tea. Jane is looking at the kitchen clock, wondering how long putting up the tent is going to take, and whether Jay has caught the Eurostar. She envisages him settling down with his son, getting the maps out, perhaps having a small glass of red wine.
It is at this point that Harriet sits down, settling her ample frame on the bench opposite Jane, and delivers the coup de grâce.
“Well, we have news for you.”
Oh yes, thinks Jane. What news could you possibly have that might suprise me, fat cow?
Harriet opens her mouth. “We have put our house on the market.”
There is silence in the room. Patrick comes sauntering into the kitchen.
“Well, shall we sally forth into Flanders Fields?” he says, to nobody in particular.
Jane cannot speak. That is what he was doing at the front of the house, she realises. Showing Brian where the For Sale post was going to go, the little shit.
“Yes, Jay and I have decided it’s probably quite a good time,” continues Harriet. “Market and all that. And with Brian needing university funds, it’s probably the best thing to do.”
“But where will you go?” manages Jane at last.
“I don’t know. World’s our oyster. Maybe stay in central London. Maybe… not.”
“Are you really going to sell? Won’t you miss the Square?”
Harriet laughs, long and loudly. “I don’t think so. Oooh, no. Miss it? Ha, ha ha.”
She knows, thinks Jane, recalibrating everything in her head. She knows Everything. No wonder Jay is on the Eurostar. Coward. She feels hot and sweaty.
“Estate agent says he has some considerable interest already,” says Harriet merrily. “From a famous person as well. No idea who. But he thinks we might have an offer within the month. So, you’ll have an exciting new neighbour. Once you come back.”
Patrick glances at Jane. She looks utterly composed, smiling and nodding at Harriet. He is quite sure, however, that not very far beneath this polite surface, his wife is at sea. Red and white blotches have suddenly appeared on her neck.
“What fun. My, Harriet, you are a dark horse,” says Jane.
Once they are in the garden, and get going, Jane rounds on her husband.
“Fucking hell. Jay and Harriet. Moving out. Cashing in and moving out.”
She undoes the straps of the tent case viciously.
“It’s very nice of her to have us in her garden, but there is so much fucking schadenfreude in that kitchen you could practically cut it with a knife.”
Patrick sighs.
“Jane, do you always have to see the worst in people?”
“Well, I know you don’t like what I say, but I have to say that Harriet is a bitch of the first order, and is delighted that a) our house is awash in some Biblical fucking flood and b) she is going to be filthy rich, quite soon.”
Jane finds, to her horror, that she is crying. She pushes the tears away furiously.
“Tents have got a lot easier these days, haven’t they?” she mutters to Patrick, pushing the long jointed rods through the thin fabric.
“That’s the Glastonbury factor for you. Loads more stuff on the market. Maybe we should all go.”
Jane shudders.
“To Glastonbury? Fuck off. Even if you have a ready made tent, the loos are like something out of a refugee camp. And I don’t know who any of the bands are these days. Nor do I want to live on Pot Noodle for a weekend. I think one night at the neighbours’ is quite enough for me.”
Patrick crawls inside the tent. He remembers the terrible conversation between them about Jay. He remembers how insistent Jane had been that George was simply making everything up, and how he had chosen to believe it. Did he believe it? Probably not, but the alternative was too horrendous to envisage. And then he had screwed Anya on the kitchen table, so it was evens. Moreover, he was enjoying himself at the moment. And now Jay and Harriet are pissing off, that makes things a lot better. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Can you hand me some of those pegs, darling?”
She crawls in with him.
“If I wasn’t so wet, this might be quite fun.”
“It’s dry as a bone in here,” he says, tickling her, and laughing.
Jane finds herself laughing, alongside him, despite herself.
Before supper, the emergency plumber rings. The plumber announces that he has been to the house and sealed the area, prior to ‘full boiler and water tank refurbishment’.
“That sounds expensive,” says Patrick.
“Of course the whole first floor will have to be redecorated,” says Jane gloomily.
“We won’t be back for about two months, I should say. We’ll have to go and rent somewhere.”
“Have some Pinot Noir,” says Harriet. “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep in the spare room tonight?” she asks, again.
“No!” shouts Jane, too quickly, and then covers it up by coughing.
She has a dizzying horror of going upstairs, entering the familiar bedroom in which she has been so often, to sleep with her husband. She must have fucked Jay about forty times on that bed.
She doesn’t want to go into the room, shortly to be walked into, cleaned, ordered by a woman who will have no idea of the erotic entanglement that it has witnessed. She doesn’t want to see that bed. She has torn her clothes off on it and rolled on the sheepskin rug beside it, and been spanked, and sucked, and pressed up against the wall there, in that room.
Going into it now, with Patrick, her husband, would be impossible. She thinks it might actually make her physically sick.
“No, thank you Harriet,” says Patrick.
“Thank you so much Harriet,” says Jane, recovering. “How lovely to have a spare room, I didn’t know you had one. That’s going to be a great asset for your estate agent, you know. But no, thanks, we’ll be fine. We can’t really leave George in th
e tent on his own. We’ll be very happy. In the tent,” she repeats.
The fish pie is eaten. The washing machine is put on. George formally hands out the torches. Harriet ventures outside alongside them, puffing on a cigarette, to have a look at the tent.
“Rather you than me,” she says.
Jane looks at Harriet. She imagines Harriet is the angel at the Garden of Eden, the cigarette a flaming sword, ordering her and Patrick out. Banished to rental accommodation after a night under canvas.
“Night, then,” she says, bending down to enter the tent, flashing the torch around the compact interior, scenting that particular camping aroma of canvas and wet grass. George is already inside, sitting up in his sleeping bag.
“Shoes off by the fly-sheet,” he orders.
“Very good, George,” whispers Patrick, wrestling his large frame into the space.
“God, Patrick,” says Jane, “be careful!”
At midnight, she hears gusts of rain come pattering back. She is with her husband and child, all in separate sleeping containers. In the garden of her lover. There is a faint light outside from the street lights. She can make out their faces, the son’s a smaller, rounder version of the father’s.
The rain goes on and on.
In the studio, Gilda is slowly swaying around the naked figure of Philip. She is wearing a belly-dancing outfit. He watches her, hypnotised.
In his new, large, properly heated and illuminated vitrine in the Reptile House, the Munchkin moves slowly along a twig and bites the head off a cricket.
At Highpoint, the concrete Caryatids bearing the heavy parapet of the foyer stand immobile in the rain, rivulets of water streaming down their faces and over their naked breasts.
In his apartment, Alan Makin tosses under 1000-thread count sheets tucked over his Emperor-size bed.
Beside him, on the Philippe Starck bedside table is a glossy property pamphlet.
The cover reads as follows:
“For Sale. Four-storey, four-bedroomed family house boasting knock-through kitchen and 100-foot garden in enviable Central London garden square.”
On the front of the brochure, there is a large tick.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Adam Foulds, who led the Guardian/ UEA fiction writing course, during which The Square came into being.
The Square Page 27