A Very Big House in the Country

by Claire Sandy

  The only place – apart from St Agatha’s – that Evie felt entirely comfortable leaving her children was at Shen’s house. There they would be cared for, looked after, scolded, loved. Mabel and Dan regarded Shen’s all-mod-cons Edwardian pile as an extension of their own cramped, no-mod-cons terrace; the price to be paid for this relaxed to and fro was the occasional sermon. Evie could withstand that. By Shen’s standards – and occasionally Mike’s – Evie was a bad mother, but she herself knew she was a good enough mother and that she did her best.

  Sitting up, Evie gave in. There was no point in forcing her brain to relax. Until she faced Mike, she would be on the run, her entire body itchy with guilt. She scrabbled for the notepad in her bag. I might as well work.

  It felt sinful writing a scene involving handcuffs and half a tub of Lurpak a few feet from frolicking tots. Using the first-person approach had not just woken up her muse; it had put the crazy dame on crystal meth:

  With agonizing slowness my tongue draws a lazy line down Clay’s chest. His body melts at my touch as my lips carry on, until the scratch of his pubic hair—

  Mike blew his nose showily, and the muse went for a little lie-down.

  A figure approached, head down. Paula was defiantly fully clothed amidst the near-nudity of her companions. By now Evie recognized that stance and girded her loins –not easy to do in a tummy-control one-piece – for the next dose of paranoia.

  ‘OK, OK, I know this sounds silly,’ began Paula, before she even reached the pool.

  All splashing stopped. All eyes were on her. The children, Evie noted, were agog. They loved Paula’s odd fancies.

  ‘Somebody,’ Paula repeated the word, stressing it, ‘somebody finished the milk.’ She held up an empty carton, like the Statue of Liberty in man-made separates. ‘It was practically full. And they left the fridge door open.’ She added, ‘Wide open’, as if that was somehow much, much worse. ‘This happened while all of you were at the pool. Just me in the house.’ She looked from face to face, as if daring them not to take this latest atrocity seriously.

  ‘Do ghosts drink milk?’ asked Miles, his arms like pieces of string in water-wings.

  ‘Apparently.’ Jon didn’t look up from his newspaper.

  With an impulse to protect Paula from the inevitable ridicule, Evie said, as if translating from a foreign language, ‘It’s not really that unusual, though, is it? I mean, there’s lots of us here, and one of us just . . . finished the milk.’ She smiled, as if to remind Paula that an empty milk carton, while annoying, isn’t life-threatening.

  ‘But I was on my own in the kitchen,’ said Paula, dogged in her attempt to weave a mystery around the milk. ‘There was nobody there to drink it, and yet it went, and the fridge door was left wide open. All while I was sitting at the table, reading.’

  The other adults were carefully non-committal, instinctively grasping her fragility.

  Setting off on another leisurely length of the pool, Clive said, ‘It’ll be Zane. He drives his mother mad with exactly that manner of behaviour at home.’

  All eyes looked to Zane. ‘Yeah,’ he said, his deep voice rippling with the rhythm of private schools and privilege. ‘You can blame me, Paula.’

  ‘Really?’ There was something like disappointment in the slump of Paula’s shoulders.

  Normal service was resumed in and around the water. Mabel splashed her brother. Amber joined in. Scarlett clambered out, dripping. Jon, who’d unbent enough to take off his shirt, put it back on and reapplied himself to his paper.

  Anointing her collarbone with lotion, Shen said under her breath, ‘Jon will have to pick up the pieces, as usual.’

  He’s the one who broke the pieces. Another thought struck Evie. ‘Hang on, isn’t Zane . . .’

  ‘Lactose-intolerant, yeah.’ Shen put her finger to her lips as she reached under her gossamer kaftan to settle the gold chain that connected her bikini bottoms to her bikini top – an arrangement that only worked if your midriff was as firm as a drum. ‘Clive wanted to put a stop to her Miss Marple impression, I guess. I mean, what does it matter? We’ll buy more milk.’

  ‘He didn’t need to throw Zane in front of the bus.’

  ‘He’ll live.’

  A tidal wave surged from the pool, drenching them both. Evie screamed, but Shen was silent. She was too furious to shout, her hair now a wet skullcap.

  ‘Oops.’ Zane surfaced. ‘Guess the pool’s too small to do a cannonball.’

  ‘Clive!’ Shen found her voice, and the doves all fled from the dovecote in a flapping mass. ‘Tell him! Tell your son!’

  Partway through another lap, Clive said, ‘Sorry, darling. Your department. I do money. You do kids.’

  Shen made a furious, razor-edged noise. ‘Zane,’ she shouted, ‘you’re an idiot.’

  ‘He said sorry,’ said Scarlett, righteously.

  ‘Actually,’ said Clive, climbing out, ‘he didn’t. The word’s not in his vocabulary.’

  Zane ploughed up and down the pool as his stepmother dug up clods of grass with her heels on her way back to the house.

  ‘Scarlett seems to be warming up Tillie nicely,’ said Evie to Mike, covertly watching the two girls draped on the grass on the far side of the pool. ‘It’s not a perfect match, but at least they’re hanging out.’

  ‘Tillie’s a lot better than the airheads Scarlett usually follows around.’

  ‘Her friends are perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary girls.’ Evie was bored with Mike’s worry that Scarlett would get in with a ‘bad crowd’, the spectral lurching mob of drug-taking, fag-smoking, teenage-pregnancy-making bogeymen that haunt all modern parents. ‘We’re supposed to think they’re airheads; that’s our job.’An idea struck her. ‘Paula!’ she called across the pool, now the setting for a water ballet involving Mabel, Amber, Miles and several drowning Barbies. ‘How about a pub meal tonight? Stretch our legs?’

  ‘But the children . . .’ said Paula. The word ‘pub’ obviously wasn’t having the miraculous effect Evie had hoped for (although, beside her, Mike had perked up considerably; ‘pub’ had worked its magic on him at least).

  ‘We’ll leave them with Elizabetta,’ said Evie, suddenly appreciating how easy life must be for nannied-up women.

  ‘I think it’s a great idea,’ said Jon, with a statesmanlike tone, as if speaking for himself and his little woman.

  ‘What if . . .’ began Paula, but her feeble dissent collapsed in on itself and she went back to staring at her fingers.

  ‘It’ll be fun, Mum,’ said Tillie, raising herself up on one elbow. ‘You’re allowed to have fun.’

  ‘I feel like a Playboy bunny,’ said Evie.

  ‘I feel like a boil-in-the-bag cod fillet,’ said Mike.

  They had different reactions to the hot tub.

  Mike didn’t get it. ‘It’s just a bath, outside, where everybody can see.’

  ‘It’s decadent, and it makes me smile.’ It was louder than Evie had imagined. All that bubbling. Not the place to have a serious talk, she decided, letting herself off the hook yet again. ‘I thought it’d make a break from lying by the pool. Not a sun-worshipper, are you, love?’

  ‘You noticed?’

  ‘The foot-jiggling. The sighing. The tutting.’

  ‘Sunbathing is just wasting time,’ said Mike, ‘while being a bit too hot.’

  ‘The sun sends me into a trance. Especially here, with all these acres around me. It’s like we’re lord and lady of our own personal estate.’

  ‘The estates I’m used to aren’t like this.’

  ‘No junkies here.’

  ‘No abandoned sofas.’

  ‘Bet you miss all those burnt-out cars.’

  ‘Jon’s a decent bloke,’ said Mike suddenly.

  ‘Hmm. Would a decent bloke snog a woman who wasn’t his wife?’

  ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  Evie marvelled at such forgetfulness; her own daily life involved myriad feats of memory, including which family members loathed
Coco Pops, which family members didn’t consider life worth living without Coco Pops, whose history project was due in, the date of the vet’s appointment, Mike’s inside-leg measurement, when her own period was due, where the scissors had last been seen, if there were any functioning glue-sticks in the house – and where her increasingly scattered marbles could be found.

  ‘Innocent,’ said Mike loftily, ‘until proven guilty, and all that.’

  ‘I saw him with my own eyes.’

  ‘I didn’t. And it’s nice for me to have a mate, you know. I want to understand Jon, not just lock him up in jail and throw away the key.’

  ‘You and your big heart,’ said Evie, soft again. She’d forgotten, in the tumult of the past few weeks, how kind her husband was. Not in a namby-pamby way, but in a muscular, making-a-difference way.

  He coughed. ‘I don’t have many mates.’

  ‘Being married to a bloke for twenty years,’ said Evie, ‘you notice these things.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mike, scratching his head, ‘sooner or later, when you’re getting to know somebody, you have that conversation. The one where you talk about where you’re from. Your background. Who you are . . .’ He tapered off. ‘And I’m not anybody.’

  Such talk chilled Evie. ‘You, sir, are Mr Michael Herrera of thirty-six Lambrook Road.’

  ‘But that’s all I am. I don’t know if I have my dad’s nose. I have no anecdotes about the cute things my grandma said. I envy you, because you have a photograph album,’ said Mike suddenly, as if confessing a crime.

  However choked he became, Evie knew there’d be no tears. He hadn’t shed a single tear throughout their life together. Not when the babies came. Not even during the bad year. She realized that’s how she thought of it: the Bad Year, as if it was in a tidy box, easily packed away. Which it wasn’t.

  ‘If you’re going to envy me,’ said Evie, ‘at least envy me for my looks and wit and . . . um . . . skill at parallel parking.’ Mike didn’t smile. She was beginning to think of it as the Wellcome Manor Effect: feelings and reactions were exaggerated here. ‘I don’t think that particular conversation will ever happen with Jon.’ She felt Mike’s interest quicken. ‘He’s too private to open up like that. He doesn’t want to chat about the old days.’ This was a gentler way of saying that Jon was hiding something, just like Mike.

  ‘Maybe that’s why I’m relaxed with him. Why I’m overlooking the little matter of Miss Pritchett. I sense he’s disconnected. It takes one to know one.’ Mike looked down at the churning water. ‘Can we get out now, please?’

  A poolside game of Scrabble was in progress, led by Shen, in a new floaty kaftan thing and a complicated bikini.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Shen always wanted to know where everybody was, and didn’t take kindly to people just taking off without prior permission. ‘Join us!’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Evie, settling down, locating a magazine, resenting her thighs. She’d played many a board game with Shen and had the bruises to prove it. The lady liked winning. The lady was also phenomenally bad at spelling; she seemed unaware of vowels. Scrabble could only end badly.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Evie. She nudged Mike as he settled down beside her, bracing himself for another stint of doing nothing. ‘D’you see what I see?’

  Mike looked up and around him, with trepidation. Twenty years with Evie had taught him that he rarely saw what she saw. ‘I see Paula and Jon half-asleep. I see Clive gloating – sorry, enjoying his holiday. And Shen playing some game with the kids that involves lots of arguing.’

  ‘First, look there.’ Evie guided Mike’s head by his chin.

  ‘Zane,’ said Mike.

  The boy was, as ever, on the fringes. Head down, he chewed the inside of his cheek, as he squatted by the brick paving around the pool.

  ‘Now follow his line of sight to the Scrabble game.’

  Doing as he was told, Mike did see what Evie saw.

  ‘Uh-oh.’ He repeated her reaction, but with bells on. ‘Oh, shit, Evie.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Zane was watching their daughter with the kind of concentration a lab technician might bring to a DNA sample.

  Throwing up her arms in triumph, Scarlett let out a bellow of joy. Her nose was more freckled than ever, and her hair was dreadlocked from constant dips in the pool. The overall effect was much more charming than if she’d spent hours in a beauty salon.

  ‘That’s not her shirt,’ said Evie, squinting at the cotton garment that hung down to Scarlett’s knees and over her knuckles. She nudged Mike, who was treating the oblivious Zane to a full-on dirty look. ‘She’s wearing Zane’s shirt. In some ancient tribes, that would mean they’re married.’

  She wondered why the boy wasn’t sitting alongside the object of his affections; beside her, Mike wondered how quickly he could hustle his daughter to a convent.

  Feeling his unease, Evie leaned in closer. ‘She’s seventeen, love. She’s already had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. Spotty so-and-so.’ A right-on liberal to the ends of his fingertips, Mike turned Victorian papa the moment a male sniffed the air in the direction of his daughter. ‘At least he wasn’t some sub-James-Dean dickhead. That boy’s trouble, Evie.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ Evie saw purity in the dark eyes trained on her little girl. ‘Clive’s very hard on him.’

  ‘So would I be, if my son drove tractors through gates.’

  ‘What if that was the only way he could get your attention?’

  ‘Even so, I’d reserve the right to react badly to driving a tractor through a gate. Zane’s a mess.’

  ‘Somebody else has noticed what’s going on.’

  As if Tillie had heard Evie’s murmured comment, she took her eyes off Zane and met Evie’s gaze.

  Without moving her lips, Evie said, ‘And she’s not happy about it.’

  ‘What?’ said Mike, wondering why his wife persisted in believing she could make herself understood without moving her lips.

  ‘I do like beams.’ The cottagey details of your traditional English pub soothed Evie. Those wonky pinkish shades on the wall lights, the gaudily framed bad paintings, the patterned carpet swirls and whirls that had soaked up much gin and gravy over the decades all conspired to take her to her happy place.

  Not so Shen. She picked up a plastic table mat adorned with a hunting scene, all red coats and nervy steeds. ‘Exhibit one,’ she said icily. She picked up her paper napkin. ‘Exhibit two.’ She pointed at the barmaid leaning chummily over the bar, her low-cut blouse straining and her raucous laugh exposing the lipstick on her teeth. ‘Exhibit three.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Mike, noting the contents of the blouse, ‘she’s exhibits three and four.’

  ‘Enough Carry On humour.’ Evie swatted him with the laminated menu. ‘They do pies!’

  ‘Pies,’ said Mike reverently, the way some people say ‘God’ or ‘Madonna’.

  ‘The wine,’ said Shen, ‘comes from a box.’

  ‘It still,’ pointed out Clive, ‘gets you drunk, darling.’ He shushed her next comment by saying, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do, Shen. We’re not at Claridge’s, we’re in a pub.’ He frowned at the menu. ‘Shall I order you a lovely mixed grill?’

  ‘What a nice pub!’ said Paula, fidgeting in her seat as if she wanted to run out screaming. ‘It’s very nice. Really nice. A nice place with nice people.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Evie. ‘They do sticky toffee pudding.’ She was anybody’s for a sticky toffee pudding; she’d be sorely tested if somebody offered to swap her one for the kids. ‘What do you fancy, Jon?’ she asked, refraining from adding: Apart from the children’s teacher, you double-whammy pervert/adulterer.

  ‘More or less all of it,’ said Jon.

  ‘I won’t have a starter,’ said Paula timidly, as if having a starter was an internationally recognized sign of immense arrogance.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Shen. ‘Everything on this menu is bad for you.’

  ‘There
’s a salad,’ ventured Evie.

  ‘With croutons!’ said Shen.

  ‘Yeah, croutons, not severed hands,’ muttered Evie, who’d forgotten how excruciating eating out with her friend could be. ‘One stodgy meal won’t kill you.’

  ‘I watch my figure,’ said Shen.

  ‘So do I,’ said Clive, raising his glass to his wife. ‘And so do those fellows at the bar.’

  Shen half-turned, a satisfied look on her face. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really, darling.’ Clive leaned across and planted a proper smacker on her lips. ‘They can look, but they can’t touch. You’re mine – all mine.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mike casually. ‘So you bought Shen, did you? I thought you married her.’

  ‘There isn’t enough money in the world to buy this work of art.’ Clive batted away Mike’s attempt to needle him. ‘Now. Champagne!’ He didn’t seem able to envisage an evening without it.

  Evie was going to burst. It had been that last Yorkshire pudding that had tipped her over the edge. She sat back and covertly undid her jeans, letting out a sigh of relief and happiness that was partly to do with her tummy’s sudden freedom and partly with the arrival of the dessert trolley.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Shen, as Evie’s clammy paw reached out for an individual trifle. ‘Consider this an intervention. I can’t let you do this to yourself.’

  ‘Get between me and this trifle,’ said Evie, ‘and our years of friendship will mean nothing. I will hurt you. I will hurt you bad.’

  ‘Don’t come crying to me when they bury you in a grand-piano case,’ said Shen, waving away the trolley as if it was loaded with nuclear waste.

  ‘Should I have a mousse?’ Paula looked as if she was making a life-or-death decision.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Jon, and then, more irritably, ‘it’s a mousse, Paula. Have it or don’t have it.’

  ‘Have it!’ said Evie. ‘Have two!’

  Paula passed. Evie noticed how she watched the retreating trolley until it was out of sight.

  ‘A toast,’ said Clive, raising his glass.

  ‘Another one?’ said Mike, as if toasts were rationed by law.