A Very Big House in the Country

by Claire Sandy

  Evie did her best not to smirk.

  Dan, still in Spiderman pyjamas, tore in and fell over Pru.

  ‘Dan’s just fine,’ said Mike.

  ‘I have the number of that tutor we talked about.’ Shen had created a balanced, wholesome breakfast that no sane person could want. ‘She worked wonders with Miles.’

  Where to begin? Not with we can’t afford it, because Shen would offer to pay. Not with Dan’s doing fine without a tutor, because to Shen nothing short of Potential Prime Minister could be classed as ‘fine’. So she went with a simpler, ‘I like kids to be thick, anyway. Makes ’em easier to control.’

  ‘I fucking hate maths.’ Miles threw down his pencil.

  ‘Miles!’ Shen swivelled to face him as the teens tried not to laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ cheeped Miles. ‘I meant je fucking déteste le maths.’

  ‘Where did he hear such language?’ spat Shen.

  ‘Why ask me?’ Evie put down her fried egg; this slur outranked her lust for crispy edges and yielding yolk. ‘Not from my children, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I don’t swear in front of him,’ persisted Shen.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Evie felt attacked.

  For an answer, Shen plonked a plate in front of Miles. ‘That word is forbidden in this family.’

  ‘Which word?’ Miles hoped very much the word was ‘maths’.

  To save The Eights, Evie flung herself in front of the bus that was Mike’s latest idea.

  His eyes shone. ‘The Thomas Hardy museum tells you so much more about the man than the books ever could!’

  Evie begged to differ, staring at a waxwork Thomas Hardy sitting stiffly at a desk, while a waxwork Mrs Hardy with her wig askew regarded her hubby with an indecipherable expression in her crossed eyes. The commentary in her headphones kept sputtering out, as if boring itself to death, along with Evie. ‘The great man was born in . . . He had a very . . . Of course, his new wife was full of . . .’

  ‘Where’s Jon?’ She tore herself away from Thomas Hardy’s actual waistcoat (the great man had been bang into green tweed, it would seem).

  ‘The loo.’

  ‘That was . . .’ Evie glanced at her watch, ‘ages ago. Unless Jon’s got a prostate problem, he’s escaped.’

  Grimacing slightly – no man can hear the word ‘prostate’ without an involuntary Oof – Mike said, ‘He’s probably buying a souvenir.’

  Yeah, cos he’ll want to remember this golden day forever. ‘He’s buggered off to see Miss P.’

  Mike rebuffed this theory, based on . . . well, very little, in Evie’s view. ‘God, you’ve got a suspicious mind.’ He looked closely at her. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘Gosh, thanks.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ Mike scrutinized her face, much as he’d just scrutinized Thomas Hardy’s long johns. ‘Are you, you know, OK?’

  ‘Yes. And unless your hand is an actual thermometer, there’s no point putting it on my brow.’

  ‘But are you OK OK?’ Mike invested the inane word with intent. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Evie heard herself become spiky. ‘Because you constantly ask me, and I constantly know what you mean. So lay off.’ She softened, regretful. ‘Please.’ Before Mike could respond, she looked over his shoulder and called, ‘Here he is!’, hailing Jon as if he was returning from a war, rather than the Gents.

  ‘See?’ said Mike as they followed Jon to the car. ‘All perfectly innocent.’

  Evie did see. She saw that Jon’s shirt was inside out.

  Mike travelled light through life; he could pick up everything he cared about, if the house caught fire. Evie, Scarlett, Dan and Mabel. Everything else could burn and melt.

  Oh. And Patch, obviously. Mike would have to carry Patch too.

  He and the dog shared the egg-shaped hanging seat in a sun-trap corner of the grounds. It was so inviting, like one of the magazine pictures Evie brandished. Now, within its rattan embrace, he was less in love with it and its seasick motion. He was half-leaning, half-sitting, Patch curved around him like a bum-bag. Mike’s philosophy of living light was proved correct; this covetable piece wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Wellcome Manor was studded with want-able, costly, desirable . . . stuff. He couldn’t find a more appropriate word; nobody would race from a burning building carrying an egg-shaped hanging seat.

  He switched position again as Patch complained softly, before reapplying himself to his master’s body, so close they were practically sharing the shorts.

  Lunch had been spoiled by a specific magic trick that Evie could pull, whereby she ignored him while talking to him. She only said things that would be in any couple’s script – Pass the salad, there’s mayo on your chin – leaving out the quirky intimacies that made them them.

  This oddness – slight but noticeable – pre-dated the holiday. She had been off-kilter for . . . Mike wondered how long. Weeks? Months?

  Perhaps Evie was right and Mike didn’t think enough about her – about them, that separate ‘them’ that was their marriage. Yet he thought about her and them all the time!

  Had he allowed his wife to withdraw, inch by precious inch, because he was too wrapped up in the time-bomb he himself had set a-ticking? Paranoia that Evie might read an inflammatory text on his phone consumed Mike, until the couple who prided themselves on honesty were divided by half-truths.

  He had a horrible suspicion he knew what Evie was hiding.

  When Mike thought of 2009, he saw the entire year in black-and-white. It was a non-year, a gap in his life – the real life that had begun with Evie.

  For longer than was sensible she had hidden her fears about her health. Mike would never forgive himself for not noticing the chasm in their closeness.

  Even now, six years later – six already? – he couldn’t say the word. Born on 30 June, Mike answered ‘The Crab’, when asked his star sign. All through Evie’s treatment and its aftermath he’d avoided the six-letter word that described her ailment. It was ‘it’, ‘the illness’, sometimes even ‘the enemy’.

  The memories were as vivid as yesterday. The talk with Scarlett; only eleven, but she’d guessed something was up. Something bad.

  ‘Will Mummy die?’ she’d asked.

  ‘No, darling, absolutely not.’ Childcare manuals would berate Mike for that promise, but he couldn’t tell his trusting little lamb the truth: Yes, Mummy might die.

  They’d been open with Scarlett after that; he recalled her blunt and gentle fingers tracing Evie’s new scar.

  There shouldn’t have been a scar. He’d kissed his wife’s forehead in the hospital bed and reassured her. ‘A laparoscopy,’ he said, ‘is soooo routine.’ They had all the facts: a keyhole incision, the insertion of a tube that sported both a light and a camera, and then the removal of the pesky stones that had caused her periodic but intense stomach pains.

  He knew she’d downplayed the agony, shutting herself away until the nausea, the sweating, the vomiting eased. It was Scarlett who’d outed her. ‘Mummy!’ she’d yelped one evening, as Evie bent to kiss her goodnight after another epic Peppa Pig tale, ‘You’ve got horror-film eyes!’

  All around the blue irises, Evie’s eyes were a curdled, sick-looking yellow.

  The particular blue-grey (or grey-blue) of his wife’s eyes were stars in Mike’s personal sky, yet he hadn’t looked closely enough to notice the change. ‘Doctor!’ he declared. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Meekly, un-Evie-like, she’d agreed.

  Before that first consultation, neither of them had given a thought to their gall bladders; they now became experts. ‘Your gall bladder,’ Evie had told Shen, ‘is a small, shy, pear-shaped creature who nestles beside your liver, spending his days processing bile, a digestive liquid produced by the liver.’

  The compression stockings had gone down a storm. ‘Christ, I’ve never wanted you more!’ Mike said, just as a nurse walked in to check that Evie had fasted for six hours.

&nbs
p; Evie had nodded. ‘I would quite literally punch my way through a steel door for a cheese-toastie.’

  They’d bantered until the door swung open and a brisk orderly arrived with a wheelchair to take Evie to surgery.

  Suddenly serious, she said, ‘What if something happens?’

  ‘Evie, Evie,’ said Mike in the voice he used to reassure Scarlett about the werewolf who lived, apparently, under her bed. ‘I’ll see you back here, in no time, and you can have that toastie. It’s just gallstones.’

  Evie’s face as she was wheeled away brought all Mike’s latent superstition to the fore. What if, he thought.

  Soon he knew exactly ‘what if’.

  The surgeon came out to talk to him. Mike had seen enough episodes of Casualty to know what that meant. He’d steeled himself not to turn and run, to listen as the surgeon used the word that turned Mike’s insides to water.

  The cancer, posh Mr Double-Barrel explained, had turned a straightforward procedure into a cholecystectomy. A more significant operation, it necessitated a wider incision. ‘We’ve removed your wife’s entire gall bladder.’

  He’d imagined Evie’s cherished body, ransacked.

  ‘It’s not a vital organ,’ the surgeon said, as if people left their gall bladders on the bus every day. Everything else had to be repeated later by the nurse, a kind woman who understood the restorative powers of strong tea.

  ‘She’s lucky.’ The nurse looked down at Mike, bent double on a plastic chair. ‘Only one in four gall-bladder cancers is spotted this early. It’s a grade-one.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Mike cringed, expecting a blow.

  ‘It’s the least likely to spread.’

  ‘So she’ll live?’

  ‘Of course she’ll live.’ The nurse laid a hand on his arm, but wouldn’t be drawn on how long Evie would live. On whether or not ‘it’ would come back. They were questions even the GP couldn’t answer, Mike was to find out.

  Evie stayed in bed, no longer yellow. Mike was nostalgic for the yellow, now that she was so very white. The scar remained angry and red and raised.

  Dismayed by her failure to thrive, nobody at the hospital could agree on treatment, wasting time debating radiation therapy. Mike was gruff and demanding with the professionals, barely able to stop himself screaming, ‘But this is my wife!’ while they hummed and harred and took yet more blood from her sore arms.

  When Evie told the story, it was peopled with kind and heroic medics doing their best.

  Mike never told the story at all.

  When radiation was deemed unnecessary, Evie swooned with relief, but Mike wanted every possible treatment. He wanted armed guards around her internal organs. At the very least, he wanted a straight answer about the likelihood of recurrence.

  This was not forthcoming.

  Meanwhile, the house had changed. The clutter seized its chance and took over, the carpets became Patch-coloured. Accustomed to having their mum on tap, the children articulated their unease in tantrums and sudden aversions (Mabel’s carrot-hatred was rooted in those days). Scarlett was sombre with her responsibility, telling the younger ones fairy tales when Evie took to her bed. The tales Mike told himself, as he lay awake beside Evie in the small hours, never had happy endings. He didn’t dare think so far ahead.

  Evie was lucky, people said; Mike never agreed. She’d lost a stone, along with her spark; his wife was not lucky.

  ‘But I am!’ she insisted, three months on, in another waiting room. (How they loathed plastic seating by now, and water coolers, and back copies of Hello!) ‘I’m alive.’ She’d pirouetted to prove her point. ‘My scar isn’t pretty, but frankly neither is my arse. OK, they can’t tell how long I’ll live, but they don’t know how long you’ll live, either! If the doc hadn’t opened me up to remove those gallstones, the cancer would have taken hold before any symptoms developed. So, see, I am lucky.’

  Mike had rehearsed how to tell his children their mother had died. He’d rehearsed what he’d say at her funeral. At the all-clear, he’d said nothing at all.

  She likened it to being released from jail. ‘Or,’ she laughed, ‘being given the all-clear from cancer!’ Unfurling, like a tree in leaf, she could once more imagine the children’s future without sorrow, inserting herself again into the family album.

  ‘You can cry, you know,’ she teased Mike after they left the surgery to wander aimlessly, dizzily.

  ‘I don’t want to.’ He was projecting himself into the future; to when the angelic chord of the all-clear would morph into a low and ugly note of fear of those six letters returning.

  Now, in the sunny calm of Wellcome Manor, Mike heard that growling note.

  The swinging seat banged against his legs as he jumped up. He needed to hold Evie, to protect her. And beg her forgiveness. Without telling her what she had to forgive.

  He wouldn’t want to escape a fire without Evie in his arms; he’d simply lie down in the flames.

  The vacant egg-shaped seat was colonized by the teens and their communal aura of shower gel, shampoo and body spray, strong enough to knock a grown man off his feet.

  ‘Ladies first, Zane!’ said Mike as he hurried away.

  ‘Cool.’ Zane hung back, letting the girls climb aboard.

  ‘Ladies?’ spluttered Scarlett.

  Wandering towards the pool, Patch at his heels, Mike considered Zane’s cool; the boy calibrated every utterance so that it could be either stroppy or polite. As if daring the world to think the worst of him.

  Not that Mike distrusted the boy: he recognized him and his wary ‘Am I welcome here?’ look, which hardened into ‘Well, fuck you anyway’ the second he sniffed rejection. Mike and Zane had much in common.

  Reaching the pool, Mike saw his red-faced wife wiggling into her swimsuit beneath a towel. He recognized her low-level panic as she desperately tried not to flash any pale flesh.

  He loved that flesh. Mike could get drunk on his wife’s thighs. The abundance, the generosity, the home at last feeling of her soft, strong body thrilled him. She was his personal adventure playground, and a kind of church too. If I told her that, thought Mike, she’d assume she’d married a lunatic. Evie’s essential her-ness was intact: nothing much was wrong.

  As long as she never found out.

  ‘Come on in, yummy mummy!’ shouted Clive from the water.

  Smugly, Mike waited for Evie to fillet the porky mogul efficiently with some choice words.

  ‘Oh, shush!’ She smiled, as if batting away a cheeky pup, not a patronizing chauvinist.

  Mike stretched out next to Shen, who was sunbathing with the same intensity she brought to everything; she was really, really sunbathing. ‘Hi, Elizabetta,’ he called casually, keeping his focus on her face, which lived only inches above her gravity-thwarting décolletage.

  ‘Hi, Mike.’

  Instantly he felt drawn into a conspiracy. He wondered if Evie noticed Elizabetta’s subtle flirtatiousness; for the sake of his balls, he sincerely hoped not.

  Whooping, Clive and Evie raced down the pool. Mike would have thrashed Clive, whose swimming style was best described as Walrus in Trouble.

  ‘I can’t compete with a young filly like you,’ he panted.

  Evie was many things, but she was no filly. Mike was surprised when she didn’t pull a face at such eye-wash.

  Mike was bursting with compliments. He admired so many things about Evie it would take a year just to jot them down, but they never made it out into the open.

  Prunella licked Mike’s fingers, then tried to jump up on him, her stubby claws vicious, even though her intent was friendly. ‘Come up . . . Gorgeous.’ He practised flattery on the flat-faced little creature. Prunella sneezed onto his legs.

  Evie had loosened him up around the kids, saying, ‘Flowers need sunshine to bloom.’ He managed to force out ‘Well done, Dan’ or ‘I’m proud of you, Mabes’. It barely did justice to his feelings; Mike was proud, but not of their achievements. He was proud of them for walking, talking,
laughing; it daily blew his mind how he and Evie had made three whole little people. Three staggeringly beautiful little people, at that.

  ‘You know how I feel about you,’ he’d said once to Evie. ‘Why must I keep saying it?’

  ‘Because,’ she’d answered, ‘you must, sweetheart. You just must.’

  She complimented him. All the time. It’s a good thing I’m level-headed thought Mike, or I could get a little cocky about my bum (he was extremely cocky about his bum). When he’d tried to explain why he rarely reciprocated, Evie had thrown up her hands.

  ‘So we’re back at the care-home again!’ she’d shouted, in a rare display of impatience. ‘Can’t we ever leave that bloody place behind?’

  ‘Hey!’ he called now to his wife, who was pushing her sopping hair back from her face. ‘Prunella’s putting on weight! But, Evie, you haven’t!’ No time like the present, thought Mike, to start complimenting your missus.

  ‘Eh?’ Evie kneaded chlorine-angry eyes.

  ‘Put on weight. If anything, you’ve lost a pound or two.’ Why was she staring like that? ‘Not that you need to. Not that anybody needs to. A woman’s weight is her own affair, even if she’s twenty stone. Which you aren’t. Not now, anyway. Now you’re quite . . .’ Mike tailed off. This flattery lark was tricky. ‘Thin,’ he ended, quietly.

  ‘Jesus, Mike, you’re an idiot,’ said Evie.

  Another magnificent meal. Evie was so impressed with Shen’s dim sum that she forgot it was good for her.

  As she filled the dishwasher, Miles ambled past, saying, ‘Psycho-bitch whore’ experimentally to himself.

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say, sweetie.’

  ‘I know!’ said Miles gleefully.

  Toting a pyramid of dessert plates, Evie said, ‘You’re a brilliant cook.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Shen.

  ‘Zank you,’ said Elizabetta.

  ‘Eh?’ Evie paused. ‘No, hang on, Elizabetta, don’t go just yet.’ The nanny halted in the doorway, her back to them, Fang’s outraged baby-face peeping over her shoulder. ‘You both prepared dinner?’