My Husband Next Door

by Catherine Alliott

  I don’t remember clearly when it was that Sebastian moved permanently into his studio. Certainly he was painting there – or not – all day every day, prowling round his easel, flicking through canvases propped against the walls, and occasionally falling asleep on the sofa, but it was Ottoline who brought it to my attention. By now she’d made the Dairy her own, in her slightly eccentric but intrinsically stylish way, just as she had once done with the farm. When I’d first seen Netherby, visiting with Sebastian years before, I’d been delighted by the unusual décor: the navy-blue sitting room, oversized lamps placed low on Moroccan trivets, huge cushions on rugs, everything dark and pretty much at floor level, so unlike the brightly lit, vanilla-coloured walls of my childhood. Ottoline herself had been potting away at a wheel in a corner of the Russian Red kitchen, a kiln in the old pantry, which she’d wallpapered with old newspapers, the downstairs loo book-lined to replicate a tiny library.

  ‘That’s where you get it from,’ I’d told Sebastian sagely on the way home to London in the car. ‘The arty side. It must have been on your father’s.’

  He’d laughed. ‘Don’t confuse arty with artistic. Ottoline makes very nice pots and I like a lot of her glazes. She undoubtedly has style, but she can’t draw.’

  ‘Just as I can draw but have absolutely no style,’ I’d mused.

  He hadn’t answered. Because it was true. I found dressing hard enough, let alone dressing a house. And once Ottoline had moved out her furniture and belongings, I saw the farm for what it was: a rather ramshackle collection of small dark rooms topped by a few gloomy bedrooms. Yet it had looked so cool and interesting in Ottoline’s time. Foolishly, I’d turned to my mother and sister for help.

  ‘Oh, we’ll have it fixed up in no time!’ they’d chortled, and within a twinkling I had ditsy Colefax wallpaper, chichi sofas with fringes and some china rabbits by Herend. I was appalled, but, having more or less commissioned them, I could hardly take it all back. Sebastian thought it was hilarious.

  ‘I’m not sure what’s worse, your mother’s faux Sloaney style, or Ottoline’s arty pretension!’

  ‘I’ll change it,’ I’d muttered, throwing a rug over a yellow sofa and taking a bronze figurine off the bookshelf.

  ‘And replace it with what? Everything you do says something about you, Ella. It’s inevitable. Every cushion you place, every word you say. It all leaves an imprint.’

  I knew this to be true and to be the root of my problem. And he knew it, too, and was telling me as kindly as he could. Not to adopt anyone else’s persona – Ottoline’s, my mother’s – but to be my own person. The trouble was, I didn’t know who that was. All I ever did was copy other people: the way they dressed, the way they designed their houses, sometimes even the way they spoke. I was a chameleon. Sebastian said he could tell who I was on the phone to by the way I was talking. I didn’t know how to be me. Even my illustrative style was closely modelled on one I’d seen before, admittedly in France, therefore far enough away – charming, bloated ducks waddling to ponds, rabbits with pot bellies and droopy eyes, deer with bandy legs – and I’d only glimpsed it in a second-hand bookshop in Aix, hadn’t even bought the book, but it had been enough. My memory was pretty photographic for certain things and I’d reproduced it at home with swift, confident strokes, much to the delight of my publisher and the ignorance of Madame de Courcy, dead these twenty years, but surely left with a flattering legacy. The implications I swept under the carpet.

  The day Ottoline pointed out that there was something else I’d swept under the carpet must have been about five years into our occupancy at the farm. I was in my attic studio, sketching away, making Sally Squirrel spring-clean her house for a visit from Harriet Hare, when Ottoline came through the door behind me, wearing her usual fisherman’s jumper over tatty old jeans and a puffa jacket. I always thought it was a blessing her style didn’t extend to her clothes as I’d surely have copied those, too. She plonked herself down in a creaking basket chair in the corner, her short legs planted firmly apart, and lit a cheroot, the small, dark cigars she smoked, knowing I didn’t mind. I put down my pencil, turned and waited, knowing she wouldn’t interrupt unless it was important.

  ‘When did you last see your husband, Ella?’ she asked, cutting to the chase.

  ‘Isn’t that the name of a play?’ I said lightly, playing for time.

  She shrugged. Didn’t answer. If I was going to play silly buggers she wasn’t going to join in. Her dark eyes held mine: not unkindly, concerned.

  I sighed. ‘A few days ago, I suppose. He said he’d rather eat at the pub. And of course, now he’s got that bed upstairs …’

  The little gallery above his studio had once hosted a table and chairs. Now he’d moved a bed in. A double one.

  ‘Does it bother you? That he’s moved out?’

  ‘He hasn’t moved out, Ottoline.’

  She snorted. ‘Well, when’s he coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly. ‘I haven’t asked him.’

  ‘And even if he has moved out, he hasn’t gone very far, is that it? And, actually, the house is more peaceful with him over there. No one’s treading on eggshells wondering what sort of mood he’s in. And, in a way, it’s sort of easier for you and the children?’ I didn’t answer. She sighed. ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge, Ella. Ask me, I should know. I told myself things like that, too. Told myself I didn’t like the diplomatic circus, that was all. Not every wife did. Traipsing from one hot country to another, all those parties – that it was nothing to do with me and Humphrey. Told myself it was the life I hated, not my husband. Or the fact that he didn’t want children.’

  Ottoline had been Humphrey’s second wife. He had children from his first; said he didn’t want any more. Sebastian and I had imagined that’s why she’d left him, but she later told me it wasn’t. That though she’d ached for children for a while, what she really wanted was a man who loved her enough to give her something she ached for. That man clearly wasn’t Humphrey. She’d come home, thrown away all her cocktail dresses and told Humphrey it wasn’t a ploy: she wasn’t going back. Although Humphrey was apparently distraught at the time and made a few trips home to try to persuade her, she wouldn’t budge. And Humphrey remarried within the year, which, as she said, rather proved her point. Rather than being bitter, though, she’d thrown herself into helping her brother run the farm, which they’d jointly inherited, started potting, and pretty much brought Sebastian up, in place of his fey, selfish mother. Humphrey had been her great love but also her great disappointment. Even more so when his third wife had given birth to twins.

  ‘Ottoline, I’ve never asked you this,’ I said suddenly, as she puffed away at her cheroot in my basket chair, ‘but do you ever wish you’d twisted Humphrey’s arm like that? Like his next wife did?’ We both knew what I was talking about.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she admitted candidly, after a pause. She blew smoke in a thin line up to the ceiling. ‘Usually in the small hours. Or on a cold, January morning. And I suppose that’s what I’ve come to say to you today. Don’t be afraid to arm-twist, if you have to. Sometimes people don’t know what they want until you give it to them. And then they’re delighted. Apparently Humphrey’s thrilled to bits with his two boys.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Just as Sebastian might be, if you told him you wanted him back here, with his family, where he belongs. Not across the way.’

  I picked up my pencil, turned and bent my head to add a feather to Harriet Hare’s bonnet. Ottoline watched me draw in silence.

  That had been then. And Ottoline hadn’t opened up to me since, not being the type for a heart to heart, even though we were very good friends, the best, despite our age difference, along with Lottie across the way. Nor was she the sort to interfere, and having said her piece, she left it at that. Sebastian stayed where he was.

  As I say, that was some years ago. He’d been in the Granary ever since and I’d been here, in the farmhouse, in, some would say,
an ideal marriage. I had a husband, but I didn’t. He couldn’t live with me, yet, it seemed, he couldn’t live without me, even though he’d toyed with the idea when a cottage came up for rent in the next village. Without meeting each other’s eyes we’d discussed him living there and letting out the Granary, which would cover the rent on his new cottage. Come to about the same thing. I was in terrible pain as we discussed, effectively, separating. I don’t know if he was in pain too. I do know it never happened. I also heard through the grapevine that he went to see other cottages, in other villages, but never clinched the deal. Instead we lurched on in our chaotic, some would say bohemian, fashion – although bohemian sounds exotic it just feels like a muddle – and the children adapted as children do. It has to be said that him staying put and not moving away was much better for them. They had both of us. The only time sparks flew – a saucepan, as it happened, full of cold stew – was when Ludo, as Sebastian put it, ‘came sniffing around’. Actually, he’d sweetly brought me raspberries and sweet peas from his garden when he’d known I was having people to supper on my birthday. Sebastian found them on the doorstep. I hadn’t said a word when I’d discovered Isobel. It had hurt terribly – after all, he’d meant it to – but I hadn’t said anything. Certainly hadn’t thrown pans. Perhaps I didn’t feel I had the right. And I’d cleared up that stew without a word of reproach, either. Wiped the walls in silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ludo was Ginnie’s property really, not mine. Or her set’s property, at any rate, Ginnie being the sort of woman who had a set. Not that he’d be aware of it – part of Ludo’s charm was that he was oblivious to his own – but she and her friends found him quite delightful. After all, he might be a blue-collar worker but he was educated and well-spoken and the collar was linen and came from Ralph Lauren. Given half a chance, Ginnie and her girlfriends would sit around breathing heavily about him and going a bit hot, albeit with absolutely zero intent.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ they said, setting down their bridge hands, the one and only time I’d been rushed across to make up a four. Celia Harmsworth had cystitis apparently, and even though I’d learned at my mother’s knee, in such rarefied company the cards slipped from my hands I was so damp with nerves.

  ‘Such mahvellous eyes,’ brayed Helena McCauley, going a bit misty and forgetting her fistful of trumps for a moment.

  ‘Mahvellous,’ her partner agreed, sipping her Chablis.

  ‘Can’t think what Eliza’s doing letting him roam around the country like that.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t care. You know what Eliza’s like. She thinks he’s never been good enough for her. And now that he’s a gardener, she’s positively dismissive.’

  ‘Silly girl. Someone will snap him up if she doesn’t want him, you mark my words. I get palpitations every time I see him in my courgette bed!’ declared Helena.

  ‘I don’t think he’s like that, though,’ someone else mused dreamily. ‘I think he’s actually a really rather nice man.’ Fond imaginings of walking holidays in the Fells in this particular head.

  ‘Nice or not, the next time he bends over to tend to my radishes, I swear to God I’m going to have trouble restraining myself,’ Helena retorted, and everyone dissolved into giggles at her boldness, knowing she was joking. Infidelity belonged to the city sisters: women to be talked about and tutted over. Of course, it happened out here too, but not to women like them, to which Sebastian would say: because they looked like horses, and who knew what their commuter husbands were up to in London?

  Smug, he told me they were, and there was indeed a certain self-righteousness about them. I didn’t particularly want to join their big-house, dinner-party gang – I knew my sister and I needed to have different friends if we lived close by, and that Lottie and Ottoline wouldn’t be her cup of tea – but I was occasionally hurt that I’d never even been invited to lunch, or to play bridge properly.

  ‘Not that you’d want to,’ Lottie had pointed out.

  No, but I hadn’t been courted.

  Except, it would transpire, by the object of their fantasies, which was something of a coup, I suppose. He’d arrived on my doorstep, back when things were particularly dire and my credit card had been cut up, in the form of a present from Ginnie. A very sweet and thoughtful one, as it happened, and which more than made up for the lack of invitations.

  ‘Apparently your vegetable garden’s a bit of a disaster,’ he told me, as he leaned languidly on my porch in a crumpled white shirt and jeans. A crumpled smile too, devastating blue eyes and that shock of unruly blond hair. ‘And your greenhouse could do with some attention. And, although you’d like to live off the land, you actually live in Waitrose.’

  ‘Tesco,’ I said absently, thinking I’d never seen anyone of that age – he must be at least forty – look so absurdly boyish.

  ‘I think your sister has visions of neat rows of cabbages and runner beans marching triumphantly into the sunset, does that sound about right?’

  ‘It sounds absolutely terrific,’ I agreed eagerly. ‘And so, so kind of her. Hang on, come in. I must just ring.’

  He followed me inside and I bustled around getting him a coffee – not instant, I decided, dusting off the percolator – as he patted the dogs, not forgetting Diblet, I noticed, ancient and arthritic in his basket. Meanwhile I rang Ginnie, thanking her profusely. Saying he was just what I needed.

  ‘I mean – the gardening,’ I said, blushing and wishing I’d washed my hair that morning. Ginnie purred and told me exactly what I was to do with him, whilst Ludo stood at my kitchen window cradling a mug and gazing out at the chaotic mess that was my garden, his back to me.

  ‘New potatoes,’ she was saying, ‘because they’re absolutely delicious if you catch them early enough, but don’t go mad because you have to dig the bloody things. And courgettes are brilliant, but beware marrows. Forget broad beans because the children won’t eat them, but any soft fruit is tremendous. They’ll eat them straight from the canes. Oh – and tomatoes, obviously. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I told her breathlessly, thanking her again and wondering how much it had cost her. Wondering too, for the hundredth time, how much Richard must earn. I put the phone down.

  ‘I thought you might want an asparagus bed and some baby onions,’ Ludo said, turning his head towards me. He gave me that smile. ‘They’re lovely in salads. But let’s see what you’ve got out there already, shall we? It may be that just a bit more planting is in order, or it could be we have to start from scratch.’

  ‘Oh – start from scratch,’ I said fervently, wanting hours and hours of this. I plunged my feet into my wellies by the back door and glanced in the cracked little mirror for long enough to see that my cheeks were flushed, which at least added a certain brightness. ‘I’m quite sure nothing can be salvaged.’ I added firmly.

  As I told Lottie later, when I popped round excitedly to see her, it had been all I could do not to turn into a Carry On character, so thick and fast had come the double entendres

  ‘Your sprouts have gone to seed,’ he observed sadly.

  ‘Haven’t we all?’ I cackled stupidly.

  ‘And your dill’s a bit leggy.’

  ‘Oh, that the same could be said of me!’ I even flourished a short little leg in a wellie, knowing it was hairy under the woolly tights.

  ‘And your cabbages need a good seeing-to.’

  Happily I didn’t respond. It would have been shameful and deeply regrettable later.

  But I did now know how Helena McCauley felt.

  ‘Talk about frustrated housewives, Lottie, I was absolutely in there amongst them. And the trouble is, he makes everything sound so sexy, even though I’m sure he doesn’t mean to. He took a look in my greenhouse and said my cucumbers were much better than his, and that his were perfect one minute but grew like mad the next. He said that, right now, he had a massive one. It was all I could do not to run snorting from the greenhouse. I felt about fourteen!’

  ‘It’s well documented, of cour
se,’ Lottie said, breaking cotton with her teeth as she sewed a name tape into her youngest, Matthew’s, school shirt. ‘It’s all to do with the soil and the seductive texture of the earth. Getting one’s hands dirty and getting right down amongst the loam and the worms. See Lawrence on this. Mellors was a classic example.’

  ‘Except he was a gamekeeper,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Yes, but it’s all that pastoral stuff, isn’t it? Being at one with nature.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he was killing nature. Or raising birds to be killed.’

  ‘Just as you’re raising vegetables to be boiled. When’s he starting?’

  ‘Next week. He’s going to create some raised beds, and naturally all I could think about was a huge four-poster with me springing athletically into it. He’s not really a gardener, he’s a garden designer, but he obviously realizes I don’t have anyone to do the spade work, as I’m sure the Helenas of this world do. Perhaps Ginnie’s told him? Anyway, he says he wants to handle mine properly.’

  ‘I bet he does!’ Lottie cackled dirtily. Then looked horrified. ‘Oh, God. Barbara Windsor.’

  ‘You see?’ I told her in triumph.

  ‘It is fairly irresistible,’ she admitted.

  ‘Certainly seems to come naturally to me.’

  She eyed me with interest. ‘And is he really like that, d’you think? Nudge nudge, wink wink, how’s about getting a bird’s-eye view of yer marrows from the bedroom window, missus?’

  ‘God, no, not remotely. Given the slightest opportunity he talks about his children. Goes completely dewy-eyed. He even referred fondly to Eliza.’