by Tessa Hadley
–Hey, Frankie!
–Hey, Laurie!
–Frankie, you’re a pain, said Ed.
Roland—his older son, who was more obedient—watched Frankie reproachfully. Laurence bounced hard, too, Frankie wriggled out of Julie’s grip to bounce again, Ivan pleaded with Laurence in an undertone in French. Ivan’s mother was French; he and Rose were bringing the children up to be bilingual.
–Hey, Laurence! Stella was a loved grandmother but also fearsome, so that the children watched her carefully. – Stop now, matey, or you’ll be sent inside.
Rose and Ivan blushed and suffered at the threat of punishment.
Stella assessed anxiously what she put on Ed’s plate. – Is it cooked?
–It’s good, said Ed, eating hungrily: he loved his mother’s food. He was relaxing into the family as usual now, after his initial stand-off. He sat next to Stella; Colin sat at the other end of the table between his daughters and his old mother. Vera had a white linen napkin tucked in under her chin. Seth was telling them funny stories about working for a theatre director Colin knew.
–So what’s this I hear about you being on the telly, Mother? Ed said.
He and his sisters could get away with calling the television the telly, and watching all the worst programmes.
–You mustn’t see it, darling, Stella said. – It would be bad for your Oedipus complex. The girls tell me I’m very gorgeous.
–I’m immune, said Ed. – You’re not my type. What is it that you’re saying, on this programme?
–That’s the real mystery. Coming out of what certainly looks like my mouth used to look, are all these words that I’m sure I’ve never spoken.
–Such as?
Stella forked up a piece of Persian spinach pancake. – How about: “it’s important not to exaggerate the importance of libertarian elements in the processes of revolution.”
–You didn’t really say that?
–She did! said Cordelia. – And “the future is on the streets of Paris and Berlin.”
–That’s the question. Was it me? It looked like me. But I have no memory of ever owning any such statements. Yet I sounded so certain.
Ed took more of the potatoes roasted in olive oil. – You old Maoist you.
–It’s easy to make fun, Stella said. – I don’t know which is more desolating: thinking how wrong I was then, or thinking that now I don’t believe in anything with that certainty. Nothing political, anyway. Nobody does, do they?
–I don’t know what I believe, said Julie, and then thought that she had drunk enough wine; she ought to stop.
–What I can actually remember about making that programme has nothing to do with ideas.
–I thought you couldn’t remember it at all, Rose said.
–It’s coming back to me. But only that I was meeting someone afterward. All the time we were hanging about in the studio, having our makeup done, frightening the bourgeois, I was on fire with the boy I was going to meet. The man. I suppose they were men, by then.
–Oh, Mum! You were wicked.
–Why did that stuff get saved in my memory, and not what I believed in?
–What she remembers out of that welter of revolutionary fervour is me, Colin suggested, triumphant, from down the table.
Stella shook her head. – Not you. It wasn’t you.
Julie looked to see if Colin minded it not having been him, but he didn’t seem to; he was still beaming proudly at Stella.
Before Stella brought out the summer pudding, Colin banged his glass with his knife as if he wanted to make a speech.
–Oh, must you? Stella said.
Julie had known Colin from the radio and television, presenting various arts programmes, years before she went out with Ed. His screen persona was hard and rigorous and exact; she was surprised when she met him by how soft and pleased with himself he seemed, as if he only really taxed himself when he was performing. Contracted to fit the television, his handsome plump brown face and thick white hair intensified and deepened; in real life she found him rather inaccessible behind a vague, easy friendliness, although he knew lots of interesting things.
–I’m going to sing, he announced, enjoying the chorus of groans. – For Stella’s birthday.
–Oh God, said Ed to Stella. – Not his Geordie childhood, please.
–But I love the songs, Stella said.
When she and Colin were first married he was still a singer on the folk circuit.
–Sair fyeld hinny. That translates for you southerners as “sore failed hinny.” Sair fyeld noo. “Sore failed now, sore failed hinny, since I knew you.”
–Cheerful, said Cordelia.
–It’s a poignant lament for lost youth. An old man sings it to an oak tree.
–Oh dear. Vera smiled round the table in wonder at her clever son.
–To an oak tree? I thought hinny was a girl. His girlfriend.
–Well, that’s what he calls the old oak tree. It’s an endearment.
Colin’s voice was still good, strong and velvety, and he sang without any affectation, not putting on the folk style that he had learned in his youth. It made a good moment, the family assembled in the long grass of the orchard under the apple trees, all lightly drunk on the white wine, the children drunk from their play, the song in its power drawing the meaning of the day together, looping them all into one true feeling that cleared their heads for more spacious and open thoughts.
Aa was young and lusty aa was fair and clear
Aa was young and lusty many’s a long year
When I was five and twenty a could loup a dyke
Noo a’m five and sixty aa can barely step a syke.
Thus spoke the ould man to the oak tree
Sair fyeld is aa sin a kenned thee!
Julie caught the eye of Cordelia’s boyfriend and knew that he was watching them all, uncertain how to fit in with this family and their unashamed grand gestures.
–Do you remember that one, Nana? Ed called to Vera down the table. – Did you use to sing that up in Newcastle when Dad was a kid?
–I don’t think so, pet, said Vera vaguely.
Later, when the children had gone off with Stella to feed the horses, and Julie and Ed were stacking the dishes from the table in a big basket to carry into the kitchen, Ed put his arms around her from behind, and kissed her on her back, naked where her dress plunged down. “Aa was young and lusty many’s a long year” he imitated, muffled against her skin, so that she knew he had been listening to his father even though he had pretended only to be weary at his showing off. She also knew that he was apologising for his moodiness earlier, and perhaps for the remark about taking her top off, although he might have just thought that was sensible advice. She wasn’t really angry with him; she had talked with Stella about how it was difficult for Ed, trying to make a career as a critic and writer and trying to do it differently from Colin—Ed wanted to be more subtle, more sceptical, less ripe—but always having to operate in the blurring, broad shadow of his father. It was no wonder he behaved badly sometimes, returned into his parents’ orbit.
At the end of the afternoon Julie went for a walk by herself. The curtains were pulled shut across the windows in the living room again, and the children were watching a film, something Colin had been sent that was only just out in the cinemas. Stella and Cordelia had taken the horses out, Rose was with the children, Ivan was practising, Ed and Colin both had articles to finish. Julie had only meant to step outside for a few minutes, but once she began to walk down the path that led along the fields and through the copse of beech trees, there seemed no reason to turn back; they could all manage without her for half an hour. Alone, she felt returned with intensity inside herself, aware of the breathing lifting her chest and the suddenly awakened noise of her thoughts rushing in the hollow of her skull. Yellow light slanted low across the path from between the trees; little birds scuffled in the undergrowth or flitted among the leaves like tricks of sight. A woodpigeon took off from a branch
with a startling racket, its wingbeats like shots. It was a lovely English summer’s afternoon: she had longed to escape into it, but as she walked it remained outside of her, as if she were walking through a commercial, or an estate agents’ brochure.
Stella and Colin weren’t really country people. Ten years ago, not long before Julie first met them, they had given up their London life. Julie and Ed lived now in the converted bottom half of the tall, Georgian, terraced house in Highbury that had been Ed’s childhood home; the top half was let out and the rents went to Rose and Cordelia. As she walked, Julie was thinking about the way the young Stella on the television programme had talked about revolution, speaking the word as if it were a knife kept hidden under her clothes, gleaming and glamorous; she could imagine nursing that hope of some violent adjustment, recharging life with its truth. Sometimes Julie was afraid of how experience now seemed thin and used up, as if her children were the only real thing. Because terrible things happening in other places were so close, on the television and the Internet and in the newspapers, even the solidity of these old hills and woods could seem worn paper-thin. Outwardly the countryside looked the same as it did a hundred years ago, as if there were a wholesome continuity preserved here, safe against change; but that was a delusion. For a start, all the cottages that must have once belonged to poor people were done up now and sold for a fortune to people from the cities.
She was nervous when she heard the noise of someone else moving in the woods behind her, twigs cracking underfoot; probably it was someone from the village walking their dog. She should have brought Tray, too, as a pretext for being here, only she’d slipped away without meaning to come more than a few yards. Looking back she saw Seth, the actor, approaching along the path, his white T-shirt flickering in the shade; he called out and waved to her, and she waited, feeling the sun hot on her in a patch of light where trees had been cut down. After lunch she had put on one of Ed’s shirts over her dress and she had been glad of it in the cool of the copse. She was pleased to have Seth’s company; as he came close her sour thoughts drew off some little distance, as if he were surrounded with a stronger force of pleasurable energy. When he asked if he could get through to the cottage this way, she said she would show him. Because he wore his black hair in a glossy mass to his shoulders, his looks reminded her of the Assyrian kings in the lion hunts she’d taken the boys to see in the British Museum; he had the same slanting cheekbones, although instead of warrior-like he was funny and friendly. He wasn’t much taller than she was, not six foot; around one wrist, she noticed, he wore a gold chain, and the brown skin of his arms was speckled with dark pores; he had a warm male smell she enjoyed, like hazelnut oil. He explained that he’d thought he ought to take a couple of hours out; he had some lines to learn. They walked on together through the trees, and then along the side of a field planted with tall elephant grass for biofuel. Seth said he’d thought it was wheat. – Shit, I’ve hardly ever been in the country before. What are those? He pointed to some sheep in the next field. – Cows? Rabbits?
–Come on, you must have been to the country. At least as a kid, on a trip or something.
–I’ve always been meaning to get round to it.
–It’s lovely here, she said. – Look at the view.
The view from the top of the field really was good; they could see all round them: the sea behind, Exmoor to the south, and close at hand the patched cloth of little ancient fields, some worn into a corduroy of ridged sheep runs, draped across a relief of steep hills and valleys so convoluted that Julie was never sure which hamlet or which woods she was looking at, although she came here often. They dropped to sit beside the Dutch barn, with a few bleached hay bales left over in it from last year. Julie knew that an unspoken alliance between them had begun at lunch, when their eyes met over Colin’s song—the outsiders in the family. Seth smoked a cigarette. – I was too frightened to smoke at the house, he said. – Cordy’s old lady’s fairly intimidating.
–Do you see the cottage from here? Julie said. – But I’ll come down with you; it’s on my way back.
–I really just wanted to clear my head, he said. – I’ll probably just fall asleep over my script anyway.
–Is this Emmerdale? she said. – Are you really the doctor?
–There I was thinking you might be a fan.
–Perhaps I’ll watch it now, just to see you.
–Do me a favour. I’d rather you didn’t. It’s so funny. I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend.
–You don’t mean Cordelia?
–On Emmerdale. The actress was already in Australia when they decided to write her out, so we couldn’t actually have the breakup; I had to do it on the phone. Only of course there wasn’t anyone on the other end; it was only me all by myself, ranting into nothingness. “What do you mean, you think I haven’t made enough commitment to this relationship?” “How can you say that I’m a selfish bastard who only cares about his work?”
Lying on his back on the stony margin of the field he laughed delightedly, and she laughed, too.
–What do you do, Julie? When you’re not at home with the kids?
–At the moment mostly I’m at home with them.
–They’re nice—pretty girls.
–Boys. Mine are the boys. The girls are Rose’s.
–Shit. I’m hopeless with kids.
–Why shouldn’t you be? she said tolerantly. – I do a bit of freelance accountancy work for small charities, because Ed isn’t earning much from his writing at the moment. When Ed and I were first together I was working as a PA for a Japanese importer. I don’t think he’d ever met anyone before who hadn’t been to university.
–They are a bit overwhelming: the family.
–I love them, Julie said. – I really do love them.
–God, I said some idiotic things to Cordy’s father over that lunch.
–It won’t matter. But you should always keep something of yourself back from them. Keep a few secrets.
Seth propped himself up on his elbows to look at her.
–Is that what you do?
–Just in case they accept everything about you.
–That would be bad?
–I’m just superstitious.
–What sort of secrets? he asked, and she laughed at him.
–Now, why would I tell you?
She stood up, brushing bits of straw off her dress, and they made their way down the side of a stubble field, treading sweetness from the camomile plants that crept underfoot; below them the slate roof of the cottage glinted through a sliver of woodland, where the last of the slanting sun touched the valley bottom. When they stepped in under the trees the light was thick and green; the path followed beside a stream sunk to a summer trickle among mossy stones. The different acoustic in the wood made Julie shiver, as if she could feel the noise of their steps and their breathing, on her skin stretched taut.
–Ed knows, for instance, Julie said, – that before I knew him I used to be a Christian. But he doesn’t know quite how much of one.
–That’s all?
–Really an extreme kind of a Christian. I ran away from home and lived with an Evangelical group for about a year. I was engaged to one of them. Quite a crazy kind of group. The women all had to cover their heads with scarves, and only the men were allowed to take prayer at the meetings. The women had to obey the men, and the men had to obey the leaders of the group. The elders, we called them. All the money we earned was collected centrally; we were given allowances.
–You’re joking. This was you?
–Amazing, isn’t it? Where did that money go? When I think about it now. I was temping in an insurance office: I put in all my wages. Those men who ran the group and the whole hierarchy were completely unelected, there were no checks on them, we never knew how they were chosen, it was a process hidden from us, we didn’t question it. We went to lectures proving that evolution didn’t happen, that God created the world in seven days.
–Surely Ed’s
heard about all this stuff when he’s talked to your parents?
–My parents don’t know the half of what went on. Also, they don’t get together with Ed’s family very often. They’re shy people. They don’t talk about very much.
–And what happened? How did you get out?
–It wasn’t a prison; we were there of our free choice. I just walked away. Well, actually I caught a train.
The last few yards were a rocky scramble; their feet skidded, sending stones rattling; there was still thick sunlight on the track when they came out beside the white-painted cottage wall.
–I haven’t talked to anybody about all that for years, said Julie.
–Do you fancy a beer? he said. – There are some in the fridge. The key’s under a brick. Cordy says there is no crime round here. Or perhaps just very thick burglars. Otherwise why hide the key at all?
On the ground floor of the cottage there was just one room, with a fridge and sink and cooker and a bed; upstairs was Stella’s studio. Seth took the top off a bottle of cold beer for Julie then excused himself and went into the tiny bathroom. She sat down on the bed and took in Cordelia’s occupation of the space: her holdall on the bed with clothes half-pulled out of it, a couple of paperbacks with their spines broken and pages furred, her iPod charging; a grubby makeup bag beside the sink spilling over with lipsticks, medicines, contraceptive pills, perfume. The way Cordelia allowed her intimate life to flow over and fill any given space struck Julie as unprotected, childlike, dangerous. The only signs of Seth were a masculine heap of keys and wallet and change emptied from his pocket, and a white jacket on a hanger on a cupboard door. The duvet on the bed was still pulled up over the pillows; they had only arrived this morning. The cottage was all in shadow, its perfunctory furnishings seemed a flimsy shell against the light outside the windows.