One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  Another well-known expression: the one with pursed lips. ‘Personally I think it’s hormonal.’ Mum’s answer to most things. She drew herself up importantly. ‘Speaking of which,’ she peered at me critically, ‘when did you last have a Well Woman?’

  ‘I’ve never had a woman, well or otherwise,’ I quipped feebly.

  ‘Don’t be fresh, young lady, you know I mean – a gynae.’

  He-lp. I looked around desperately, but everyone else was occupied.

  ‘You have got a good man, haven’t you, darling? You’re not still trotting down to that heaving surgery on the North End Road with the rest of south London?’

  ‘Er, well, you know. Now and then.’ I sank into the glass of wine Hugh had handed me. I wasn’t going to tell her I let years go by, ignored countless reminders for check-ups; let them gather dust.

  ‘It’s about time you saw my man Stirrup. I’ll give you his number. Oh, do stop smirking, Hattie. It really is time you grew up and stopped giggling at names. He’s quite the best.’

  ‘Right.’ Hugh was upon us now, beaming nervously, rubbing his hands. ‘That’s decided then. Laura’s going to take Hattie and Maggie to the kitchen. Apparently she wants you to see it in natural light, Hatts, before it gets dark. That’s why she headed off there in the first place. The rest of us can stay here and chew the fat.’

  Natural light my foot. He’d capitulated. Maggie and I obediently took our glasses and fell in behind Laura, who led us, pink-cheeked, head held high, out across the hall, then down the long passage to the kitchen.

  Through a heavy panelled door we encountered a cool, high-ceiling room smelling slightly of ancient stone and polish. A giant baroque chimneypiece rose up before us from the old black range, and a vast oak dresser thick with copper pans flanked one entire wall. An old refectory table stretched centrally, a bench either side, and a white butler’s sink sat on a cupboard under the tall window. Original grey slate tiles spread at our feet. The room hadn’t been touched for fifty years, and although the peeling cream walls badly needed a lick of paint, other than that, it was perfect. Maggie stood still in the doorway, awestruck.

  ‘Oh, but this is terrific. It’s like a museum piece!’

  ‘It is a bit of a relic,’ Laura agreed, chewing her thumbnail and looking round.

  ‘Yes, but that’s the point. Apart from the walls – and I love that floor, by the way – I wouldn’t touch it. I certainly wouldn’t dress those windows, and that cracked old paint on the shutters is fab. Lucky you!’

  ‘This is the room Laura would like us to do,’ I explained helpfully.

  ‘Oh.’ Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘Right.’

  ‘You see, the walls are such a state,’ Laura rushed on, ‘and in here too, the pantry.’ She led us into another totally perfect room, albeit with peeling walls, but lovely slate shelving all the way round, more tiles on the floor. ‘Needs totally revamping.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maggie, faintly.

  Hugh stuck his head around the door. ‘Just come for the ice.’ He smiled and reached into the freezer for the bucket. ‘Don’t forget to show them the breakfast room.’

  ‘They’re not doing the breakfast room, Hughie,’ said Laura. ‘Ralph is doing that, remember?’

  ‘We’ll go,’ I said quietly to Maggie later, as we climbed the stairs to get changed for supper. ‘If they haven’t agreed this beforehand between themselves, I can’t get involved. This has all the makings of a family feud and I won’t be caught in the crossfire. I’m annoyed with Hugh, actually, for putting me in this position.’

  ‘Nonsense, it won’t turn into a feud. It’s only decorating, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Remember Lambrook Gardens?’ I intoned darkly.

  Maggie paused on the stairs, shaken. Forty-one Lambrook Gardens had housed a recently married, loving young couple, with diametrically different tastes. Things had finally come to a head when he slashed her suede headboard and punctured the water bed with a knitting needle, but not before she’d tap-danced in studded rugby boots all over his highly glossed and varnished floorboards, which ran throughout the entire house. The decree absolute was through in six months.

  ‘But he’s adamant, Hattie,’ Maggie insisted in a low whisper as we went on upstairs to the gallery. ‘He’s got it all planned out. He told me when he showed me round. He wants all this horrible oak painted in the hall to lighten it—’

  ‘And she wants it all French-polished,’ I hissed. ‘She told me!’

  ‘And he wants to get rid of all the chintz and heraldic stuff—’

  ‘And she wants more chintz and more heralds. Wants to recreate a Victorian country house, as far as I can tell. Doesn’t want to modernize at all.’

  She frowned. ‘I thought Laura had style?’

  ‘She does,’ I said loyally, ‘but it’s a conventional sort of style. She certainly doesn’t do minimalist.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a compromise?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. This is a disaster, Maggie. I’m so sorry to have dragged you in and it’s all my fault for not sorting it out properly, but we’ll leave in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. We’re here now; we can at least stay the weekend. It would be rude not to. Ooh, is this me? I can’t remember.’ Maggie pushed a door into what was palpably not the spare room she’d been allocated. We stood surveying Hugh and Laura’s master bedroom, complete with four-poster bed, hideous parrot wallpaper, and matching curtains and bedcover. Parrots do require the lightest of touches and there were more here than one would care to see in a rainforest.

  ‘God.’ Maggie boggled. ‘How do they stand it?’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, it was Hugh’s parents’ room up until recently. That’s the point: they want a revamp.’

  ‘Whoever does it, it’ll cost a fortune,’ she murmured, going to the window, feeling the ancient cloth. ‘This place is huge. Each room to be stripped, repapered, recurtained… has he got the moolah?’

  ‘Easily. That’s why Laura and Mum are so twitchy with excitement. City bonuses still go a long way these days.’

  ‘She’s quite shrewd, your sister, isn’t she?’ Maggie dropped the cloth and turned to me, narrowing her eyes. ‘I mean, she’s nabbed an aristo, but he’s not a chinless wonder: he’s got brains too. Most of them are penniless and stupid, aren’t they?’

  ‘No, she’s not shrewd,’ I said shortly. Maggie was an only child, and sometimes I sensed she resented the closeness Laura and I shared. Single girlfriends can be awfully possessive. I ushered her out before we were caught loitering in the master bedroom. ‘She loves him,’ I said simply. ‘Always has. She certainly didn’t marry him for his money. After all, money doesn’t buy happiness, does it?’

  She gave me an arch look before going into her bedroom, the one she’d been shown to. ‘Maybe not,’ she drawled, ‘but it certainly helps.’

  *

  Supper that evening was a sparky affair. Toxic, even. No children as yet, to lighten it. Laura’s brood, like Seffy, didn’t come home from school until tomorrow lunchtime after matches, so we were missing the high spirits of the young, and more than usually prey to the quixotic undercurrents of bubbling bad temper of the adults. We ate in the kitchen, Laura coaxing a roast chicken out of the oven, pink-faced and muttering darkly as she nearly dropped it, whilst Hugh popped corks, keeping up a resolutely chirpy banter. Maggie, at the table with Mum, Kit and me, looked on in an alarmingly anthropological manner. She was quiet too: always a bad sign.

  ‘D’you ever use the dining room?’ she piped up eventually, innocently, but I could tell this was going somewhere.

  ‘Never,’ said Hugh cheerfully. ‘At least not for ten years or so. The aged Ps never liked it. Fiendishly cold and dark, ridiculously large too. I remember the odd Christmas in there, as a boy, but other than that, no.’

  ‘But you’ll use it, won’t you?’ she persisted. ‘I mean, eventually?’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose the odd din
ner party. But kitchen suppers are more the thing, aren’t they? Much cosier.’ He put the bottle on the table and sat down.

  ‘And you don’t use the morning room or the billiard room, the ones you want us… the ones that need decorating?’

  ‘Christmas,’ said Hugh again. ‘The morning room, that is. When the village children come to sing carols, we pop them all in there. Quite jolly.’

  ‘But the billiard room?’

  ‘Well, I don’t play billiards!’ he chuckled, pouring everyone a glass of wine.

  ‘What about that blue room, then? The one off the drawing room through the double doors.’

  ‘That’s the Blue Room.’

  ‘But you don’t use it for anything?’

  Hugh looked bewildered. ‘It’s not really for anything.’

  ‘So… why d’you live here?’

  I cringed.

  ‘I mean, if you only use one or two rooms downstairs, and hardly any upstairs, and you’ve got so much work to do, which will frankly take ages and cost a small fortune, why not sell it and buy somewhere smaller?’

  Laura’s eyes boggled into the chicken as she brought it to the table on a board. We were short of men so she was next to me. ‘Don’t be silly, we’d never do that. Hugh’s family have been here for two hundred years.’

  ‘Yes, but two hundred years ago people had servants, masses of them, so there would have been about twenty people living in a house like this, which would have made sense. All those attic rooms would have been full of maids and now they’re empty. The coach house would have had grooms sleeping above it, and even though you’re a big family, you’ll rattle around in it. Surely you’re perpetuating a patriarchal way of life that simply doesn’t exist any more?’

  Maggie had read Sociology at Newcastle. She’d also had two large gins.

  ‘What you mean is, isn’t it rather selfish to have all these empty rooms when so many people have nowhere to sleep at all?’ enquired Kit slowly. Disingenuously too, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.

  Laura put down her carving fork and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, yes, marvellous, Kit. All those people sleeping in bin bags in London – they could all come down and get a bed here, couldn’t they? Why not?’

  ‘Well, why not?’ asked Kit mildly.

  Maggie blanched, unused to my brother’s simplistic method of taking away the sins of the world.

  ‘But then where would you stay, Kit, hm?’ enquired Laura. ‘En passant from Oxford, if all the rooms were full of poor homeless souls shooting up. Under the billiard table, perhaps? You might be glad of it then. Gravy, anyone?’

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t mean that, actually,’ said Maggie nervously, more used to flexing her argumentative muscles in Notting Hill of a Friday night, where discussions took less of a knee-jerk turn. ‘I was thinking more from Hugh and Laura’s point of view. It’s quite a thing to be saddled with. Quite a responsibility.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s only entrusted to me for a length of time, that’s the point,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s not mine to do what I like with, just to keep going for the next generation. In point of fact it’s Luca’s, really.’

  ‘Luca,’ muttered Laura, viciously stabbing the carving knife into the chicken breast. ‘Hughie, come and do this, would you? Before I massacre it.’

  Hugh obediently stood and moved round to take over. ‘Of course, my darling. You only had to ask.’

  ‘Luca?’ asked Maggie, with a frown. ‘I thought your son was called Charlie?’

  ‘Luca is Hugh’s son by his first marriage,’ explained Mum smoothly, pussycat smile firmly in place. ‘Now, Maggie, can I pass you the mangetout?’

  ‘Who’ll probably sell the place anyway,’ said Laura, ‘the moment it passes to him, which, if Hugh gets his way, won’t be when we’re under the sod, but when he deems we’ve had a Jolly Good Crack At It and it’s time for the young to have a go while they’ve still got the energy. While I’ve had to wait fifteen flipping years and am definitely out of energy!’

  Maggie, grasping the finer nuances of the situation, opened her mouth. Shut it again. ‘Oh. So how old is—’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ interjected Mum.

  ‘And where—’

  ‘In Florence, with his mother.’

  ‘So how often does he—’

  ‘Not often, just once or twice a year, generally in the shooting season. More broccoli, Maggie?’ Mum was purring away like an old Bentley, flashing her vivid smile.

  ‘Won’t you?’ Laura demanded of Hugh, not deflected.

  ‘Won’t I what?’

  ‘Pass the house to him?’

  ‘Well, I certainly won’t wait till he’s too old to enjoy it.’

  ‘Like we are.’

  ‘And I don’t see the point,’ he went on quietly, and in what was clearly a practised fashion, ‘of decorating it up to the nines, at vast expense, if Luca decides in a few years’ time he wants to redo it.’

  ‘Few years! Few years? Is that all you’re saying we’ve got?’

  ‘I’m speaking figuratively. Of course we’ve got more than that. But you must see, darling—’

  Whatever it was she must see, though, she didn’t. With a strangled sob Laura pushed back her chair, and ran from the room, throwing down her napkin on the way.

  There was a silence. Somewhere upstairs, footsteps thumped along a corridor. Then a door was heard to slam.

  Maggie cleared her throat. ‘I’m awfully sorry. That was entirely my fault.’

  ‘No, no, it’s been brewing for some time. I’ll go.’

  Looking grey and daunted, Hugh got to his feet to go after his wife. I put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Actually, Hugh, can I?’

  He sat down again, heavily. ‘With the greatest pleasure.’

  I got up and followed my sister from the room.

  3

  I found Laura in her bedroom, prostrate on the bed, face down amongst the birdlife. Her body was shuddering with sobs. I sat quietly beside her for a while, my hand on her back. Eventually she calmed down. After another moment, she stopped completely: flipped over and sat up, drying her eyes on a pillow.

  ‘Stupid. So stupid,’ she muttered. ‘And I am so spoiled.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Yes I am. I’m horrid. Ghastly. Beastly to Hugh, snappy with the children. I’ve been revolting for months.’

  ‘But why?’

  She clutched the pillow fiercely to her chest, threw her head back and blinked at the ceiling, blue eyes huge and wet.

  ‘Because… oh, Hattie, I can’t explain. At least not to you. It’s why I haven’t seen you.’

  I felt a lump rise in my throat.

  ‘My little sister, who works hard all day, weekends too, who’s permanently juggling bills and trying to make ends meet. And I’m bellyaching about not having a manor house – for ever. About not being able to pass it on to Charlie.’

  ‘But you knew that. You always knew that.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d pushed it to the back of my mind because I had other fish to fry. I had to get my hands on the place first, so all my energy went into that. I was so intent on getting our feet under the table, and now that we’re here, I’ve moved on. I’m obsessed with something else, with staying. And I do want to do it all beautifully, not skimp – not that using you would be skimping.’ She reached out and touched my arm. ‘But Hugh says, if it’s only for a few years, what’s the point in spending so much money? And I think – well, what’s the point of being here at all? – and I get so depressed.’

  ‘Have you said all that to Hugh?’

  ‘Well, you heard me tonight, and it’s not the first time. And the moment I voice it, it sounds so terrible, like snakes and venom coming out of my mouth. These six months have been the unhappiest of our married life,’ she said sadly. ‘And they were supposed to be the happiest. I thought, once we were here I’d never want anything even again. But I do, I do want more. And I am so disappointed in myself. That’s what it is. I s
imply don’t like me,’ she said vehemently.

  I swallowed. ‘Everyone thinks like that. Everyone always want more. It’s human nature.’

  ‘Not always. Not you.’

  True, I didn’t really. Not materially. I loved my little house, my shop, my work, my son. If I could have had more, if I had that longing she spoke of, it would have been years ago, and would have taken human shape. In the form of Dominic. Laura could have any man she wanted: she only had to walk in a room and smile, so I supposed it was natural her lusts were more worldly. Dominic I could never have because he was married, and then he’d died, so that had been that. Even now, though, if anyone mentioned his name, I caught my breath. Felt trembly. Or if I thought about him, I had to sit down: stop whatever I was doing. Years ago, I got a white light in my head, which dazzled me, prevented me from seeing anything else, and I suppose Laura had lived the last fifteen years seeing only this place, a blinding white light. She hadn’t seen the complications, only her dream. But dreams have a way of becoming nightmares if too many years lapse before they’re fulfilled. Where once Laura had been the ex-model with three small children waiting to occupy the ancestral pile and grace the pages of Hello!, now she was a middle-aged woman with teenagers poised to flee the nest, living in a ticking time bomb of a mausoleum as a wicked stepson debated when to turf her out.

  Wicked? No, but difficult. And Laura had tried hard. Always. Right from the very beginning when she’d inherited Luca as a mixed-up six-year-old, shattered by his parents’ divorce, born with a withered arm, brought up by nannies as Carla pursued her own ends, her film career, her social life. So Luca was shipped over to England in the holidays, to his father, and Laura and Hugh did their best. Lots of attention and time, holidays in Cornwall, fishing for crabs in rock pools, Laura newly married, then heavily pregnant, then with toddlers, but really feeling she was getting somewhere by the end of each summer, forming a relationship with him. She’d ring me elated: ‘He let me put him to bed, read to him, we had long chats. I’m really getting through, Hatts.’ And then next time he came, she’d ring me aghast: ‘He’s so different, so cold, so distant! What the hell do I do?’