Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  These same elements were broken quickly enough that day by her half-sister Evita, a hefty lump of thirteen, who jumped fully clothed into the pool with a heavy sack of books strapped clumsily to her back. It was the second time she had tried to kill herself in as many days, this attempt more determined than the last. The day before, her mother had rescued her from an open manhole in the road, Evita’s chubby face full of terrifying curiosity, an experiment with death dangling in school uniform and sandals. To her mother’s happy dismay, Evita’s dyed mohican, making her the youngest punk in the county, alerted her to the danger, the bobbing lump of pink hair visible by the upturned manhole cover. Helped by concerned and puzzled onlookers Petula, having yanked her out of harm’s way, scolded her daughter theatrically, announcing: ‘My children don’t always walk in my ways I’m afraid.’

  When asked what she thought she was doing Evita had answered that she had ‘wondered what it would be like to be dead.’ At the swimming pool she went further, shouting ‘I want to die’ gruffly as she plunged onto the local Member of Parliament, disappearing with him under his grinning inflatable crocodile.

  Regan could not recall how her father reacted to this crisis that preempted his last truly tender appearance in public with Petula. What struck her most about the clamour was that Petula alone overcame her shock and acted, various men waving their towels excitedly, and screaming ladies dropping their sunglasses to no practical effect. Her mother, with singleminded precision, somersaulted like a giant swan in search of a cygnet, her legs all that could be seen of her as she disentangled the flailing schoolgirl from her waterlogged prop. Pulling Evita to the surface with determined impatience, she began to bark orders to the shocked extras, many of whom seemed to be on the verge of spontaneous applause. Quietly Noah towelled himself down, his expression unreadable, the edge of the pool thick now with anxious well-wishers, prepared as one to be led. Petula’s eyes searched for Noah and instead saw something that interested her more: power. It was lying there, glancing off the water, waiting for someone to notice it and change everything. The prize was hers to pack up and take home with her. A man she had never noticed before offered her a bathrobe, Evita quite forgotten, and as Petula draped it over her shoulders like a cloak, she reflected on this emerging quality. It was no wilting rose, rather a precious metal, unseasonal, there to wield whenever she chose. Like a millionaire who made money to give it away, Petula had used love to gain the confidence necessary to dispense with it and embrace her true calling. Regan remembered very little else about that day, adults jostling her inconsiderately and a forest of legs smothering her yelps for attention. A particular kind of abandonment was effected as Petula brushed her hand quickly over Regan’s hair, while talking to someone else, her interest obviously focused elsewhere.

  ‘She is a little madam, isn’t she?’

  ‘So long as she doesn’t acrobat off a wall or trapeze into a pool, I’ll count my blessings with this one! Listen, do you feel like another drink? Fill me up too, I fancy getting really squiffy!’

  Everywhere grownups were shrieking with laughter, Evita’s jump effecting a release of nervous energy in the gathering. Regan felt her guts, small as they were, being controlled by some outside force: she was coming down the hard way. Tears followed. Was it because Petula had forgotten to say goodbye as she entered the next stage, or that Regan actually feared being taken with her? Different days would offer different answers. A taxi ferried the children home that night, a treat, or at least it should have been, as it was Regan’s first trip in a hired car.

  Superficially life continued as before, which meant existence took on a shallow hue, reality ushered sideways and enacted after bedtime in places a little girl could not go. Under Petula’s firm hand, the grand spectacle of the Montagues grabbed the limelight, self-image reinforcing the fantasy and fantasy supplanting truth. This world of appearances with all its garden-party polish would be the childhood Regan looked back on, the music recitals, visits to sculpture parks and banquets at stately homes, all part of her debt to Petula. From this foundation Regan learnt to savour the ecstasy of perfectly executed surfaces, resplendent in their multifarious forms, heedless of all they obscured. Her detective instincts and ontic discomfort underwent benevolent moulding, Petula allowing Jazzy and Evita to go their own way, each a lost cause compared to Regan, her little thoroughbred. By the time Regan entered school she was adept at asking the questions to the answers her mother provided. In omitting to note anything Petula took for granted, Regan gave up memories of her own at the very point she ought to have acquired them.

  Noah remained a marginal, if charming presence, his moustache swiftly turning salt-and-pepper. If he chose to see the rise of the house of Montague as an extension of the moment by the swimming pool, he could be excused. Unlike Petula he was innocent of the future. The audience for his family’s machinations grew larger than ever, it was just that the society he regarded as unimportant was Petula’s true target, and he part of the bait that would draw them in. Regan noticed that her father, never loquacious, and positively pained in the presence of her half-siblings, resorted to a strange kind of silence, one too embarrassed to admit it had lost a winning hand. It came with a wide and mildly gormless smile worn to deflect proper intimacy, reminding her of a louche cartoon dragon that was used to advertise a famous brand of mouthwash at the time. Petula understood her husband’s strategic importance and was frustrated that he seemed not to, Noah too much the sensualist to delay gratification for her ambitious schemes, yet remaining an intriguing proposition to others. If his vacillating absence from her dinner table annoyed, or a sinister import was read into the smile that turned sardonic as his fortune was whittled into Warhol prints, renaissance busts and other circus turns, Petula did not allow it to slow her. Family life and ‘modest social success’ were to continue unabated even with key players only formally present, an arrangement better suited to an idea than people, like many others of that century’s innovations.

  Full promotion from childhood to sisterhood for Regan would be a matter of time, not choice, and with it the notion that it was better to make it up the mountain than ask what the climb was for. This code would attract success in every aspect of her life with two stubborn exceptions: an uninterrupted night’s sleep and romantic love. Sisterhood worked for as long as she was able to convince herself she had no need of these fancies and threatened to crumble if she did not; an eventuality that Petula, with personal experience of the horrors of both, would be prepared for, hand on heart and whip in hand. For time could tell even if Petula could not, that the most bitter threat of all had been there from the start, living in the least celebrated cottage on the farm, The Wart, its youngest inhabitant the sisterhood’s last test and first challenge.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  neighbours and a trip.

  It was The Wart’s misfortune to sit below The Heights. Had it existed for itself this pretty little cottage may well have been the happiest of homes, but instead it suffered from comparison with its pushy neighbour. The Hardfields had lived there for generations, privately hoping that each owner of The Heights would be the last and that the property would revert to them. Edgar Hardfield had sold the farm to pay off gambling debts a century before, his only condition being that his ancestors be allowed to work the land he lost, with The Heights reverting to them should it ever fall to its original selling price. For decades this long-term strategy did not appear hopeless, or at least not absolutely so. The Heights’ middling size told against it, too big to be self-contained or managed easily without help on the one hand, too small to be properly competitive and profitable on the other. Since the original sale stipulated that it could not be amalgamated into a larger property, The Heights tended to attract gentleman farmers and dilettantes, the Hardfields running the place in practice, none of them trying too hard to make it a success or allowing it to be too apparent that lowering the value of the property was their game. Frustratingly, the price for The Heights remained o
bstinately beyond the Hardfields’ reach, there always being some enthusiast seduced by its beauty and ignorant of its trifling potential. As locals knew the holding to be a poisoned chalice, interest came from far and further afield. In just the three years after the war The Heights changed hands four times, the well-intentioned and wilfully blind coming and going in shifts. A stable period in the fifties, during which two old spinsters subsidised it until their trust ran out, was followed by neglect and turbulence. Rich Brazilians bid for it at auction and only visited twice in four years, a couple from London discovered it was too far away for a weekend home and a musician quickly sold it on, having discovered the house was listed and could not be hollowed into a giant studio. In this way hope was kept alive for the Hardfields, the failure of others papering over their own stasis.

  It was not until the arrival of the Montagues that the Hardfields conceded that they had met their definitive match. Here were a family of realists who were happy to use The Heights as a front for their property empire on Teesside, collecting at the farm on weekends to polish their new money. Far from being ousted, Benjamin Montague gave the place to his youngest son Noah as a twenty-first birthday present, and the young playboy defied expectations by taking the measure of the Hardfields, renting out the farmland and keeping them on as glorified gardeners for the main house.

  By the time Seth Hardfield married Jenny Rowe, The Wart, or Chudleigh as it was known on the electoral roll, had begun to embody the history of which it was the outcome; a battered and beaten air hanging over its untended garden and dilapidated pathway. Unlike his forebears, Seth retained no dream of returning to The Heights or even sabotaging it on the quiet, his resignation shaming him into denying his own property’s attractiveness and abandoning projects to improve it. The Wart subsisted in a state of permanent incompletion, a half-finished bathroom and kitchen forcing the Hardfields to clean their teeth at the well, a badly botched annex allowing the snow in, every winter. To an outsider the Hardfields appeared to still believe the long-awaited move up the hill could come any day, why else would they inhabit a building site? Only Jenny’s habit of planting tulips every year gave any indication of long-term planning, the front garden a collection of weeds and stones, the back a verifiable jungle of weeds, rotting apples and empty jerrycans.

  It was not just the grounds and cottage that stood in painful contrast to the illustrious two towers on the hill. Seth and Jenny, only a few years older than Noah, were a pair tired before their time. An exhausted surliness weighed down their efforts to live a little; the twinkle-toed philandering of the young Montague rubbing salt into the staid youth they had barely emerged from. As Noah partied hard and drove sports cars into hedges, they listened to cricket on the wireless and fixed household appliances. Life was not entirely without its compensations. From the start they were very much in love and instinctively patient with each other’s ennui, amusing themselves with their imperfections and failings. Seth, a robust hulk built to wrestle cattle, saggy jowls hanging off his face like papier-mâché sacks, worked energetically in the Montagues’ garden in a way he would never have in his own, his wife not minding one bit. His only concession to show was to be bluffly unapologetic in his enthusiasms and honest about what they were. He loved to gaze at sheep (an animal thanks to which his son would one day be hailed as a genius, for putting them into glass cases of formaldehyde) poultry and cattle, maybe feeling an affinity to simple animal life, its ignorance and absence of plans. No one was sure since stating his interests, not explaining them, was his way.

  In human affairs Seth was modest and only slightly bitter, the bitterness worked off by sitting alone in unlit rooms and taking long walks under the stars, the walks lasting as long as it took for the twitching in his neck to subside. Never looking forward to anything, or living in hope, meant Seth was free to occupy the present moment in a way few were. If questions of depression ever bothered him he never told, his insistence on being ‘normal’ meaning that he was too sensible for such things, or his view of normality was; so he ended by rejecting conventional notions of ‘depth’ out of hand. Such dreams as he had were concerned with rural meditation and not material conquest. His wife trusted him and never doubted that what he lacked in ambition was made up for in unimaginative goodness.

  Jenny Hardfield shared her husband’s outlook with an extra level of fearfulness all of her own. For her The Wart was a oncein-a-lifetime gift, a good thing that could easily be taken away unless they bought it, an option her husband dismissed as unrealistic. She hoped, above all, that the Hardfields were needed, occupying a valuable niche between Noah and his new wife Petula, a couple who did not believe in one another, she guessed, and might have need for intermediaries. To make themselves necessary was the best way of guaranteeing their future security, as Jenny, originally from Manchester, had never felt settled in Yorkshire. Having children was her greatest wish, and being told she could not, a terrible blow. After a brief period of becoming very religious, which did nothing to increase her egg count, the decision was made to adopt. Helpfully Noah knew a family of Jazz musicians in Scunthorpe who could fix such things, and in the same week as Regan was born, the Hardfields had a baby of their own, a dark little bundle named Mingus. As a three-person unit the Hardfields at last found a stability they had contrived to avoid, the bathroom finished at last, the annex completed and the kitchen installed. If they still did not have much to say for themselves, their silence in no way invalidated a rich appreciation of what they had.

  It was sad, then, that Petula should dislike them so much, especially as their newfound contentment coincided with her own grand plans for The Heights, in which she expected them to play a (menial) part. Petula found herself torn between regarding them as useful dullards she respected enough to not mock openly, and fearing them, her husband’s kindness and laxity towards the Hardfields striking her as dangerous complacency. What if, she mused, the great nothing between their ears under close inspection revealed itself to be something, a subversive something that upset the new order she wished to establish. A firm servant–master relationship was thus enforced, quite at odds with Noah’s cavalier slackness, Petula afraid that familiarity could encourage a boldness that would hasten an erosion of her authority. A firm hand with all employees and tradesman, indeed anyone she had no need to impress as being nice, originated from this time, the Hardfields carrying the considerable brunt. They did not mind; like the Test Cricket they faithfully followed, the monotony of suffering that lay before them was welcome because of the remote and hypothetical outbursts of pleasure that might grow from it. The Hardfields were there for the long haul.

  For Petula’s son, Jazzy, the Hardfields were great trees that reclined under their own shade. Petula and Noah had withdrawn from Jazzy for largely the same reason; they felt that he looked and sounded like a small version of his father, an uncomfortable reminder of a player who had been removed from the board. For Noah there was little more he could do than feed, clothe and stand near the boy in photographs, dutiful indifference tempered by an existential unease meaning the two were destined never to bond. Petula, who had already scolded herself for calling Evita ugly whenever she lost her temper, was even less sure of Evita’s older brother, a horrible absence of feeling coming over her in his presence. Jazzy, who was conscientious, imitative and affectionate towards anyone who would let him be, was not yet sharp enough to be aware of this, experiencing her lack of affection as a game of chase. His memory of his earlier life, and the father he was estranged from at only four, left a quizzical vulnerability that Petula could not bear to answer with love, however much she felt he needed it. Her hope was that Jazzy’s simple nature was indicative of insensitivity and that what he would never know – a doting mother – would not hurt him too much. The inescapable conundrum, one she disliked herself for entertaining, was that he and his sister held her back, blamelessly spoiling things by their existence and inability to act like children of hers should. In these circumstances it was no surpr
ise that Jazzy should gravitate to the Hardfields.

  From them Jazzy developed the notion that the underdog was not always wrong and there was no shame in possessing the face of an Anycock. He had never resembled his father as much as Petula insisted (her obsession planting the thought in Noah’s head), Jazzy’s pin-point nose and high forehead a boyish tribute to her own aquiline features. As a consequence he grew up with good looks he was not aware of, taking compliments as extravagant praise he thought he did not deserve. From Seth Hardfield he got his two walks, one that he did not know about and one he did. The first natural, head down, his eyes concentrating on his next step, though more likely, on nothing at all. The other deliberate, its manner one of long-suffering patience, the tread of a proud man walking away, his head held high from an argument he did not want, his opponent a lost cause. It was hard to tell which walk was for public consumption, and Jazzy would keep both for the rest of his life, alternating between the two depending on whether he was angry or not.