‘Keep at it,’ had been my advice, and she had. But each time he was ruder, more confrontational, and I’d been shocked to witness his teenage years: druggy, surly, calling Laura ‘woman’. But then he’d had countless operations on his arm, which had never improved. He slunk around the lodge frightening Biba and Daisy, Laura’s girls, letting loose a stream of Italian at them: a sinister figure who scared even Laura, now.
‘Has he improved? Luca?’ I asked tentatively. ‘Hugh says he comes to shoot. Has he gentrified miraculously? Head to toe in tweeds?’
‘Of course not. He shoots in an old airman’s jacket and ripped jeans, while Hugh looks pained and embarrassed but doesn’t dare say anything. He’s coming in a couple of weeks’ time. I might rope you in for moral support.’
I smiled. ‘Thanks.’
She sat hugging her pillow. Lay her face sideways on it. A beautiful, sculpted, sorrowful face. We were silent a moment.
She raised her head and went on in a low voice, ‘You might not believe me, Hatts, but I’m honestly not upset for me. I’m upset for the children. To move them in here, then suddenly move them out when Luca marries—’
‘Is that when it changes hands?’
‘Not necessarily. It’s at Hugh’s discretion. But that’s what he said the other day, apropos of nothing. “When Luca marries I’ll hand it over, won’t let him wait like I did.” Well, he’s twenty-two, Hattie. It could be a couple of years!’
‘Unlikely. Most people don’t get married till later, these days,’ I mumbled. Luca wasn’t most people.
‘OK, but still, say five years. It’s not so bad for the girls. They’re teenagers, they’ll be off in flats in London after university; home won’t be so important. But for Charlie, who’s only eight, to move out…’
‘Children move house all the time! He’ll understand. Look at us – sixteen houses in twenty years!’
‘Which is precisely what I didn’t want!’ She turned fierce eyes on me.
I sighed. I’d never thought it was so bad, our slightly nomadic lifestyle as Dad’s job took us from place to place, country to country sometimes. But siblings raised identically often have totally different takes on their childhood. What Kit and I had thought exciting, Laura had thought muddled, unsettling.
‘And the thing is, Hatts, years ago, we could have bought a perfectly nice house with Hugh’s salary, made it a home. A lovely country house with paddocks, pool, a court, but manageable – oh, listen to me! Paddocks, pools, a court, as if they were staples!’
‘It’s only natural. It’s what your friends have all got, so it becomes the norm.’
‘Yes, but you do… slightly lose touch with reality. Lose perspective. Money does that. And you also become… a bit isolated.’
Ah. I’d wondered. I’d never envied Laura’s life because I liked living in a road with lots of people. Loved London, loved waking up to its buzz, walking to my shop every morning, grabbing a cappuccino from Paulo’s, exchanging a cheery word with my neighbours, couldn’t imagine driving half an hour to see a friend, as Laura did. I knew Maggie was up the road, Sally round the corner, Ben and Steve in their art gallery, Mum and Dad a tube ride away. Dad.
‘What would Dad say?’ she said in a small voice, reading my mind.
‘He’d be hugely sympathetic.’
‘That I was upset, yes, but secretly appalled too. Troubled by a daughter who was seemingly so obsessed by wealth and status. He’d draw parallels with the American Dream, ask me gently if I’d ever read Gatsby. Quietly disapprove. Like he does with Mum. I am Mum,’ she said sadly. ‘I’ve turned into her.’
‘You are not Mum.’
She blinked rapidly down at the bedcover.
‘You’re panicking,’ I said firmly. ‘And that’s only natural. It’s a huge undertaking, this place, and I can quite see you’re nervous about pouring everything into it, only to have it taken from you—’
‘Exactly!’ She looked up quickly. ‘Like – like bringing up a child, knowing you’d got to give it back. Imagine if Seffy’s real parents hadn’t died, and they’d shown up one day saying, we want him back!’
‘Well, no, that would break my heart, Laura,’ I said slowly. ‘We’re talking about a house, here. A pile of bricks.’
‘Yes,’ she said quickly, breathily. She looked appalled. ‘You see?’ she whispered. ‘See what sort of a person I’ve become? How I’ve lost touch with reality? See?’
We were silent a moment. Both preoccupied with our thoughts. After a bit, Laura shifted on the bed. She brought her knees up to her chest and clasped them: a regrouping gesture.
‘And I haven’t asked you anything at all about yourself. I’m so obsessed with my own life, I’ve completely tuned out of yours. I’m sorry.’
I smiled, recognizing genuine contrition when I saw it. ‘Don’t be. Not much to tell.’
‘Oh, yeah? Mum thinks you’ve got a man.’
I coloured. ‘She does? Why?’
‘Don’t hedge. She says she rang you the other day and you were short of breath and said you’d been for a run. She thought, Hattie doesn’t run for a bus, and then she heard a man laughing in the background.’
‘Ah.’ I remembered it well. It had been the turn of the airing cupboard to host that afternoon’s erotic activity, which had been hot. That, amongst other things, had left me breathless when Mum had rung.
‘Well, come on, who is it?’
‘Um… you don’t know him.’
‘Of course I don’t, but give us a clue.’
I scratched my neck. ‘He’s… just a bloke.’
‘That’s it?’
‘No, obviously not, but…’
‘But what?’ She stiffened. ‘He’s married?’
‘No.’
‘Well, thank the Lord. I gather Maggie’s got one of those. OK, so what’s the problem? Oh – does he make you dress up? Wear rubber, or something?’
‘Don’t be silly. No, he’s quite… you know.’
‘What?’
‘Young.’
Laura’s eyes widened. ‘Oh. Young. How young?’
‘I’m… not sure.’
‘What d’you mean, you’re not sure. Haven’t you asked?’
‘Er, no. Not yet. Not very, I don’t think. But he did take GCSEs rather than O levels. And he’d never seen a vinyl record before.’
‘You’ve been spinning discs?’
‘Well, the more modern equivalent.’
A light went on behind her eyes. ‘Sex!’ she breathed. ‘For the sake of it.’ She gazed at me entranced. ‘Can’t remember when I last did that and didn’t tick it off my list of Things To Do. You know what Mum will say?’
‘Where’s it going!’ I yelped, panic-stricken. ‘I know, so please don’t tell her, Laura, promise?’ I gripped her wrist. ‘Pinky promise?’
‘No, I won’t. But… be careful, Hatts. Is he good to you? Treats you well?’
‘Of course!’ I was aware of my cheeks flaming.
‘And who picks up the restaurant bill?’
‘Well, him, for sure, obviously.’ I wasn’t going to tell her we hadn’t got to the restaurant stage. Were working backwards towards it, so to speak. From bed.
She raised her eyebrows, quizzically.
‘I’m not a sugar mummy, Laura. He pays his way.’
‘What – from his pocket money?’
‘Don’t be silly, he’s not that young. And anyway, it’s not that unusual, is it? Look at Emma Thompson and Greg thingy, and, um, Joan Collins—’
‘Joan Collins! Her husband’s known as the antique dealer!’
‘Is he?’ I was appalled. Licked my lips. ‘Well, heavens, I’m not marrying the guy. It’s just a bit of fun. Just a fling.’
How naïve it sounded, sailing boldly out of my mouth into the stratosphere.
‘Oh, really?’ She held on to those ironic eyebrows. ‘That doesn’t sound like you, Hattie. You don’t do anything you don’t pour your heart and soul into. You don’t do fli
ngs. Don’t do anything for kicks.’
I got up quickly from the bed in one fluid movement, wishing she didn’t know me so well. Know how I ticked. I was falling in love with Ivan, I knew that, and couldn’t seem to stop myself. Falling. Such an apposite word. Free-falling, face down, arms and legs out like a starfish, probably a heavenly sensation with a parachute to steady you, to add a note of caution, but not so funny without one and with a bumpy landing. And I’d been careful all these years not to do that. Since Dominic. Not to get involved.
I went to the window and narrowed my eyes to the gentle, undulating hills beyond. My phone vibrated against my thigh in my pocket, and in true Pavlovian response, I felt a thrill go up my spine. All those texts. Ten a day sometimes, designed to make the heart beat faster. ‘Morning, my love, you’re beautiful’ or ‘Can’t stop thinking about you.’ Not as many as Maggie, of course. She was on thirty a day. Like fags, I thought in surprise. I wasn’t a chain texter, like her. Could I wean myself down to one a day, perhaps? Just a quick fix after breakfast? Maybe one could get a patch. On the NHS.
I sighed and leaned the heels of my hands on the sill, gazing out. It was beautiful, that view, but you couldn’t live on a view. I wondered how Laura did. Oh, what, so texts and a toy boy were better? I pressed my forehead against the glass, trying not to think what might have been – years ago. Before there was any need for younger men. He’d grown up round here, of course. Dominic, not Ivan. Not in the grand, ancestral way that Hugh had, but on the edge of the village, which was how Laura met Hugh in the first place – through me knowing Dom. Through Hal, Dom’s younger brother, who’d been a mate of mine at university. Yes, Dominic and Hal Forbes, who’d lived… well, over there, surely. I stared; turned to Laura, who still had her head resting pensively on her knees.
‘Is that Little Crandon?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘You couldn’t see it from the lodge.’
‘No, I know, but we’re further up the hill now.’ She got up and joined me at the window. ‘I rather like it, actually. Don’t feel quite so alone. I like to draw my curtains at night and see someone else in the village draw theirs.’
‘And Letty still lives there, does she?’ My heart began to pound.
‘In The Pink House? Yes, look, you can see it from here. Left of the village, go two fields across from the church… then down in the valley where the sheep are, see?’ She pointed. ‘Their land marches with ours, as Hugh puts it, which always makes me think of thousands of blades of grass going left-right, left-right, in strict formation.’
‘Letty and her daughter?’
‘Yes, Cassie. Although for how much longer I don’t know. Irony of ironies, Hal wants to kick her out too. We had a coffee the other day, Letty and me – well, turned into a bottle of wine – the main thrust of the conversation being how to keep one’s relatives’ thieving hands off one’s property.’
‘But that’s outrageous. The house was Dominic’s, and Letty is his widow. What right has Hal got to it? And Cassie… surely if it’s anyone’s, it’s hers?’
‘Well, I may have got that wrong. You know Letty: she’s a pretty unreliable source. But Hal certainly wants her out. It’s a lovely place, but again, quite isolated. A bit of a schlep from the village. You went there once, didn’t you? With Dominic? Dispatch boxes and things?’
I nodded. Couldn’t trust myself to speak. She meant when I worked for him. At the House of Commons for about a year. And yes, I did go there. And it was, indeed, lovely. As was Letty, his young wife, pregnant at the time. The whole thing was idyllic: a pretty, smiling, welcoming wife, stepping out of a sweet pink house with roses round the door – heaven. Which was why nobody, not even Laura, who knew how I ticked, had known, or indeed could ever know, how deeply, passionately in love with him I’d been. How loving, but not being able to love Dominic Forbes had altered the entire course of my life.
4
I met Dominic through his brother, Hal, who I’d been friendly with at Edinburgh. Hal and I were in our fourth year together, reading Law and English respectively; we also shared the same student house along with one or two other friends. Well, OK, I suppose Hal and I were slightly more than friends. He’d taken a shine to me, is how my mother would have put it: not a phrase to trip off a student’s tongue in the nineties, but it did rather aptly describe Hal’s devotion to me and my refusal to get involved with him. I don’t think I even kissed him in a drunken moment, pining quietly as I was for the full back in the firsts: six foot two, spectacular thighs and fatal, devilish smile. I was flattered, and I liked Hal, but that was it: romantically he didn’t press any of my buttons. It didn’t seem to deter him, though. He didn’t exactly carry my bags, but I’d often come out of a lecture theatre to find him lurking by the coffee machine, huge army greatcoat drowning him, dark hair long and scruffy, pushing his glasses up his nose, poised to get us both a milk and two sugars.
After one particular seminar, which had turned into more of a careers discussion and from which I’d emerged steaming, I’d been particularly grateful for the polystyrene cup he handed me. Everyone seemed to have a vague idea of what they wanted to do next, and some were positively shot through with conviction. My other flatmate, Kirsten, a narrow-faced, focused Scots girl with precious little joie de vivre, had even done something sinister called a ‘milk round’, whereby prospective employers kerb-crawled around universities picking up potential worker bees: Kirsten was now on course to work for Unilever for the rest of her life. I’d been stunned as she’d dropped this bombshell mid-seminar.
‘But how d’you know you’ll like it?’ I’d demanded. ‘Selling toothpaste, shampoo – how d’you know you’ll be passionate about that?’
‘Why do I have to be passionate?’
‘Well, what’s the point, otherwise?’
Our tutor had sat back with a watchful smile.
Kirsten’s eyes, which already, it seemed to me, had been traded in for lightless, corporate ones, met mine coolly.
‘The point is it’s good money and it’s one of the best marketing training schemes around,’ she’d said in her thick Glaswegian accent. ‘And the fast track to management level is infinitely better than in most PLCs.’
The voids of my ignorance opened before me. Trainee, management… I didn’t even know what a PLC was. It seemed a long way from discussing the pastoral motifs in The Mill on the Floss. It also seemed to me that for four years we’d been encouraged to be idealistic in our work and hedonistic in our play, and overnight were expected to transform into thrusting, power-hungry executives. And it was typical of Kirsten, who was supremely organized – one of the reasons Hal and I lived with her was she had a fine line in acquiring decent student accommodation – to be ahead of the game. The public school contingent at Edinburgh, particularly the boys, called girls like Kirsten Wee Marys, whilst the Wee Marys in turn called them the Fucking Yahs. I didn’t belong in the Scots lass camp, but didn’t really fit into the other either, being a bit dubious socially: or as Kirsten sweetly and succinctly put it, ‘Yer not really posh enough, are ye?’ I lined up with the Yahs none the less. We were laid-back, nonchalant and cool. So cool we missed the employment boat.
‘I don’t have a clue,’ I’d wailed to Hal in the coffee bar as we’d slopped our drinks across to a table. ‘Everyone else seems to have a clear idea of where they’re going and what they’re going to do and I haven’t given it a thought.’
I’d been far too busy: having fun, partying, dyeing my hair unusual shades, wearing lurex tights, drinking, smoking, meeting boys – so many boys but never the right one. As I’d looked at Hal then in the coffee bar I’d thought what a shame it was he was quite so skinny and sallow-looking, and why did he stoop? If you’re tall, for heaven’s sake, stand up. And that annoying way he had of clearing his throat before he spoke. Laura was right – she’d breezed through Edinburgh on a shoot for Harper’s when Bailey had her draped around the castle walls in Givenchy – Hal was sweet enough, but drippy
. Not in the ranks of the rugby-playing heroes I aspired to.
‘Well, what d’you think you want to do?’ Hal asked.
‘I don’t know, that’s just it! Something arty, I suppose, but I’m not creative. And I like old things,’ I said vaguely, staring bleakly into space. ‘You know, china, glass, that type of thing. French stuff, mostly.’
‘Like all that rubbish in your room.’ This, a reference to my precious and nearly complete Limoges tea set.
‘Antiques of tomorrow,’ I’d told him tartly, lest it be thought I was starting some sort of bottom drawer; lest it betray my only real – and shameful – ambition: to get married.
‘Well, how about working in a museum, then? Or a gallery?’
‘Ugh, too stuffy.’ I slumped forward miserably on the table, nose to the rim of my coffee cup. I tried to drink it without picking it up. ‘It’s all right for you, you know what you want to do.’ I wiped my chin as coffee dribbled down it. ‘Save the world.’
Hal was going to be a human rights lawyer.
‘I don’t know about that, but I wouldn’t mind trying to make it a better place, at any rate.’
‘You see?’ I sat up. ‘Caring, altruistic… and you’ll be at the centre of things too, where it’s topical, where the action is. That’s where I want to be,’ I said suddenly. ‘Where the action is.’
Hal pushed his lank and frankly greasy hair out of his eyes. Adjusting his spectacles he said hestitantly, ‘I could always ask my brother, if you like? If you just want to tread water and get some work experience, you could maybe get a job with him for a bit.’
‘Where does he work?’ I’d asked, thinking it was a pity Sam McKinnon hadn’t come in. He often had a coffee here after his History lecture. Before rugby training. Sometimes in his kit. I craned my neck round.
‘The House of Commons.’
‘The House of Commons?’ My head snapped back: my neck came out of my shoulders like a tortoise.
‘Yes, he’s an MP. Well, a Government whip, actually.’
‘A whip.’ My, that sounded exciting. A leather-clad lothario wielding a hunting crop and bearing, oddly, a startling resemblance to Sam McKinnon sprang to mind.
One Day in May Page 4