A Very Big House in the Country

by Claire Sandy

  Expecting a request to sleep in her bed, Evie had been relieved when Mabel and Dan had crawled off to their own berths. She braced herself, however, for some manner of psychological hangover. They’d witnessed real violence for the first time. She remembered Paula’s shrieks, and Amber trying to run to her.

  ‘Hi, you lot!’ Evie stalled their mad dash.

  ‘Mabel hurt my face,’ said Amber immediately, as if grateful to find an authority figure to report to. ‘She put a thpoon on it and it was completely marmaladey.’

  ‘That,’ said Evie, ‘is disgraceful behaviour, Mabel.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mabel proudly.

  ‘Dan,’ called Evie, flapping her hand to summon her escaping middle child, ‘all of you: you know, don’t you, that you can talk to me or any of the grown-ups any time about – well, anything?’

  The blank faces told Evie she needed to be more specific. ‘About last night.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Amber. ‘He was a pig.’

  ‘That’s your daddy, though,’ said Mabel. ‘You kind of have to love him.’

  Funny how the weeny ones cut straight to the heart of everything.

  ‘We were frightened last night,’ said Evie. ‘But we’re all safe now. If you feel scared or unhappy, that’s fine too.’ Her audience were earnest, giving her their full attention. ‘Do you have any questions?’ She scanned their faces. ‘Anything at all. I’ll answer it.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking . . .’ Mabel pursed her lips. ‘Which one’s your favourite eyebrow?’

  The drawing room looked like the last act of an Agatha Christie play, when the country-house guests assemble to hear whodunnit.

  Everybody was there, from the titchiest to the tallest. Nobody said it out loud, but they needed to be together.

  The oil paintings of long-dead gentry stared down at the tea things scattered over the inlaid table, the open drinks cabinet, the baby lolling like a drunk on the silk rug. Those who were alive stared at Jon, who stood in front of the fireplace.

  ‘Before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I want to formally thank Shen for what she did.’

  Applause broke out. Evie felt tears prick her eyes. She tended to cry at sudden applause, like she cried at guide dogs, speeding ambulances on their way to help the sick, an old lady being offered a seat on the bus; it was a wonder she managed to get anywhere, some days.

  ‘Bravo!’ she shouted.

  In crumpled sweats, Shen closed her eyes and shook her head, as if it was a case of mistaken identity. ‘It was just an aikido move. I do it every week at my class,’ she said. The enormous armchair she’d chosen dwarfed her further, and its tasselled splendour emphasized her bedraggled state.

  ‘I saw a new side of you last night, darling,’ said Clive, his ham-like hands making plenty of noise.

  Shen stirred. ‘You did?’

  I didn’t. Evie had always known what her pitbull-in-a-chihuahua’s-body friend was capable of.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Paula, the word lost in Shen’s ovation. The red upholstery of the sofa unhappily matched her eyes, which were sore and swollen. She’d sobbed through the hour cloistered with the police, sobbed all the way up the stairs to bed and was still going, a tissue held to her nose. Dan had asked if she was trying to get into The Guinness World Records.

  ‘Paula,’ said Jon. ‘I think these people deserve an explanation.’ Altered magically by the night’s events, he was, Evie realized, relieved. He took a deep breath, but Paula interrupted him.

  ‘Let me,’ she said. ‘It’s my story, Jon.’ She honked into her hanky and took Jon’s place by the mantelpiece, blinking away his reluctance.

  Mabel stage-whispered, ‘This is better than a film’, and Paula began.

  Each word came out well chewed, as if she’d contemplated for a long time how to say this. ‘That was Carl out there last night. We’ve been married for almost twenty years. Jon was at the wedding. Just a teenager then, he was fourteen. In a velvet suit.’ She looked at him and he nodded, still wry about the hated suit.

  ‘One expects some sartorial humiliation,’ said Jon, ‘as the bride’s little brother.’

  Evie looked at Shen who looked at Clive, who looked at Mike, who looked at Patch, who was chewing his own leg.

  ‘Yes, Jon’s my younger brother. We’ve always been close,’ said Paula, oblivious of the You’re not kidding lift of Mike’s eyebrows. ‘I turned to him when . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself,’ she went on, and began her tale.

  Marriage to Carl had been happy, to start with. He hadn’t worn a balaclava in those days, presumably, and they’d got on well, fancied each other, shared the same dull but wonderful goals: a house; babies in that house; a nice holiday once a year; overspending at Christmas. There’d been a corkboard in the kitchen covered with snaps of the new baby and reminders for NCT coffee mornings. Carl was a police officer, good at his job, respected in their small community.

  ‘Where did you live?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Warwickshire.’ Nothing much happened in their sleepy town. ‘Carl was no front-line copper. He was a neighbourhood-beat officer, ticking off truanting kids, then giving them a lolly.’

  ‘Sounds idyllic,’ said Clive.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ said Paula. She and Carl were two separate couples. There was the public Paula and Carl, who held hands, took their daughters to the park and were stalwarts of the PSA. The other couple lived amongst sharp angles and deep shadows, as Paula waited for Carl to erupt.

  He could ‘go’ if his dinner was too hot. If Tillie didn’t look him in the eye when she spoke to him. If the weather report forecasted rain. When there was an R in the month; when there wasn’t.

  Paula summed up her Carl. ‘He’s a very angry man.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ muttered Clive.

  ‘I could give you reasons for it.’ Paula shook her head, dispirited. ‘But nothing explains the rage. His life was no harder than the next person’s.’

  ‘So he was violent towards you,’ said Mike, grimly.

  ‘Actually, no. He didn’t need to be.’ Paula glanced at Tillie in the window seat, head down. Scarlett and Zane flanked her, each holding one of her hands. ‘If he’d attacked me, or the girls, it would have been easier.’ Paula put out her arms. ‘Amber, do you want to come to Mummy?’

  Amber shook her head, twisted her body so that she curved around Mabel, who patted her absent-mindedly.

  ‘Have you ever seen an elephant at a circus?’ asked Paula.

  ‘Um . . . yes,’ said Evie.

  ‘Did you notice the chains around its ankles? They’re delicate, thin. The elephant could raise her foot and break free. But she never does. Because she’s been chained up since she was a baby, and she believes that chain will still hold her back.’

  ‘You’re an elephant,’ said Evie, before thinking how that would sound.

  ‘I’m an elephant,’ agreed Paula. ‘Bit by bit, Carl dominated me. Telling me exactly what was wrong with everything I did, or wore, or said. Nobody, he said, except him would put up with a fool like me. Useless. Ugly. Boring.’ She shrugged. ‘If I stood here all day I wouldn’t run out of his insults. I had to stand and listen until he was finished.’

  ‘In front of the girls?’ asked Mike.

  ‘In front of the girls,’ confirmed Paula. Now that she’d found her voice, it grew stronger. ‘He’d always been a fusspot; I used to tease him about it, but something changed when Tillie was born . . .’ Paula frowned as if still unpicking this conundrum. ‘Carl became compulsive about order and safety, going far beyond fitting baby-gates. A video camera above Tillie’s cot recorded twenty-four hours a day. He checked out the neighbours’ police records. Visitors wore cotton gloves to pick up Tillie. I had to list each mouthful of food, and he’d go quiet if I’d had to improvise and cook something not on his approved list.’

  ‘What happened,’ asked Evie, ‘after he went quiet?’

  Paula looked to the ceiling. ‘Hours – all-nighters – o
f relentless character assassination while he made me scrub and rescrub the floor, or wash every window in the house, or bleach all the cutlery. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all like that. There were times when we were . . .’ she offered the word apologetically, ‘we were good. We had fun. We went to the coast. All the conventional stuff. And then, out of nowhere, something would catch his eye. I’d hustle the kids away. Brace myself. And it would start. Tillie began to . . .’ Paula looked over at her older daughter. ‘You began to stick up for me, didn’t you, darling?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tillie curtly, clearly suffering to see her family’s filthy linen aired in public. ‘He’s a bastard,’ she added.

  ‘Tillie . . .’ Paula was reproachful.

  ‘Well,’ said Clive, ‘he is a bastard.’

  ‘He’s also her father,’ said Paula.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Tillie, loud and clear.

  ‘Well, darling, technically . . .’ Paula stopped, gave up on that one for the time being.

  The complexity of her situation dawned on Evie. She felt guilt slip its blade between her ribs; she’d been the first to label the Browns weird.

  ‘Paula.’ Zane held up his hand as if at school. With all eyes upon him, he was timid. ‘I’m not being funny, I don’t want to be mean, but . . .’

  ‘Why didn’t I leave?’ Paula exhaled heavily. ‘I did. But he found me. Every time.’

  ‘How many times?’

  Before Paula could answer, Tillie said, ‘Five.’

  ‘Each time you went back,’ Evie guessed, ‘it was fine for a while. Then . . .’

  ‘Much worse.’ Paula wrapped her arms around herself. ‘It’s hard to hide from a police officer. He has eyes and ears everywhere. He has access to all kinds of information. I went to a refuge once. Oh God, that was the worst. I mean, it’s been bad, but that time he went berserk because somebody might have recognized me, and his bosses might have heard about our home life . . .’ He never bullied the girls.’ Paula stressed this. ‘I don’t think he ever would.’ It was his wife he blamed for everything. She was stupid, she was thoughtless, nothing got through her thick head. During their favourite television programmes he whispered that she was ugly, old, a slag.

  ‘For the love of God,’ murmured Mike.

  ‘Quite the charmer, our Carl.’ Jon went to a window and looked out, lips gummed together.

  ‘It got worse and worse, until the scenes joined together to make an unbroken line.’ Paula looked startled as she rehashed those days, as if they’d happened to somebody else. ‘It was my very own hell. No bars on the windows, yet I was trapped.’ Carl controlled the money, doling out an allowance each week and demanding comically detailed expenses. Friends became an impossible luxury; the strain of double-think was too much. As Clive drove her to the supermarket – she wasn’t ‘permitted’ to walk such a distance alone any more – she envied the ordinary lives behind each lit window.

  ‘The police . . .’ began Clive.

  ‘The authorities weren’t an option; Carl is the authorities. He drummed it into me that, however far I ran, he’d never stop looking. And he’d find me.’

  ‘I convinced her to leave,’ said Jon from the window. ‘Rubbish! I said. Carl’s a local bobby, not Batman. If she went to London, say, it would be impossible to track her down.’ He sighed. ‘I can still hear myself saying it.’

  ‘I wanted to believe Jon, to believe it was possible,’ said Paula. ‘But Carl had access to my social security numbers, my driving licence – all sorts of records. He swore he’d find me.’

  ‘And then?’ said Mike, with the therapeutic voice he used to talk to the damaged people who came to him for shelter.

  ‘He’d kill me.’

  ‘No,’ said Evie, the word automatic.

  ‘Yes,’ said Paula.

  ‘But if he was never violent before . . .’ said Clive.

  ‘He told me he’d kill me,’ said Paula. ‘And Carl’s a man of his word. If I hid, I had to stay hidden forever.’

  ‘What made you finally decide to leave?’ Shen asked this so avidly that Clive gave her a sideways glance.

  ‘Carl was on lates. The night before, I’d commented on a TV presenter’s shirt and he’d exploded. My orders were to clean the bathroom with a toothbrush. He said he’d dust for fingerprints when he came home.’

  ‘What?’ Evie had to let it out.

  ‘Fingerprints!’ said Miles. ‘Brilliant!’

  ‘I reached under the bath with this mangy old tooth-brush and I thought: No.’ Paula quivered, reliving the force of that short word. ‘Just bloody no. Pardon my French.’

  Tillie pushed her hair back and spoke. ‘Mum got us out of bed. Told us we were going. Told us to pack a small bag.’ She turned to Scarlett. ‘Imagine that: packing a bag, knowing you can never come back for what you leave behind.’

  Scarlett shuddered. Evie imagined the internal tug of love between her daughters’ hair-straighteners and her diary. Evie thought of the tea set her gran had left her, the bed she’d given birth to Scarlett in, the framed Beatles posters in the sitting room.

  ‘We had to leave Tippytoes,’ said Paula. ‘He was grey – a rabbit, I think. Fake fur. Amber slept with Tippytoes every night. And I left him there, on her bed, because I was this close to hysterical, imagining Carl’s key in the door. She still looks around for Tippytoes when she’s upset.’

  Poor Tippytoes, thought Evie. Poor Amber.

  ‘We didn’t even ask why,’ said Tillie. ‘We just fled. Mum,’ she leaned forward, ‘you did the right thing.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Paula threw up her arms and let them drop; she was unconvinced.

  ‘They came to me,’ said Jon. The physical similarity between him and Paula was obvious now; both had a gentleness of expression, a recessive quality that ran right through to their unobtrusive colouring. ‘She asked if they could stay.’ He told her no.

  ‘You what?’ Mike looked as if he hoped he’d misheard.

  ‘I’m not proud of it, but Paula and I were estranged when she turned up on my doorstep.’ He pushed his palm across his features. ‘You see, I couldn’t watch, I couldn’t stand by . . .’

  ‘Everybody fell away,’ said Paula. ‘We were toxic and impossible to be around. And of course I made excuses for Carl. I drove you mad, Jon, insisting it would get better.’

  ‘I should have been there.’

  Evie knew Jon would take that guilt to his grave.

  ‘She’d stayed with me before.’ Jon knew the drill. Paula and the children would camp out in his flat, ignoring Carl’s texts, which spanned a predictable range from tearful to incandescent, then back to contrite sniffles. Carl would approach the kids at the school gate with little presents.’ Noticing Evie sit up, he said, ‘Yes, that’s why Paula had a fit over the hairband you bought for Amber; why she imagined the worst, when Amber wandered off at the beach.’ Finally, Jon went on, Carl would turn up with flowers and promises, and Paula would find herself believing, because that was so much simpler than the alternative.

  ‘The truth is,’ said Jon, ‘Paula believed Carl’s tripe because he indoctrinated her to believe that she couldn’t survive without him.’

  ‘It wasn’t all tripe.’ This exchange had the feel of a well-worn debate. Paula tried to explain; life after Carl would be so neurotic, so stressful, it was easier to carry on living with the horror.

  ‘Better the devil you know,’ said Evie.

  ‘Exactly!’ Paula looked grateful to be understood. ‘You,’ she said to Jon, ‘kept going on about how he wasn’t some all-powerful god, how he couldn’t track me down if I went far enough. And now . . .’ The facts spoke for themselves.

  ‘I have the rest of my life to regret being so naive.’

  Mike stood. ‘This is Carl’s fault – nobody else’s. Don’t go taking the blame, Jon.’

  ‘Easier said than done,’ said Jon.

  ‘Almost everything is.’ Mike looked at Evie, and she was wrenched away from Paula’s story and
back to her own.

  ‘Anyway.’ Paula described how they’d sat up all night, going backwards and forwards over the same barren ground, until they’d trampled her emotional landscape flat.

  ‘And the moral of the story is,’ interrupted Jon, ‘never make an important decision at 4 a.m.’

  ‘Big, anonymous London,’ said Paula, ‘seemed the best –the only – place to hide. We had to think of a new name.’

  ‘You’re not really a Paula?’ asked Zane.

  ‘I am, but none of us are Browns.’ Paula fiddled with an earring. ‘We kept our first names. Amber couldn’t cope with remembering them.’

  ‘So, who are you?’ Clive almost smiled at his preposterous question.

  Jon bowed. ‘I’m Jon Thorpe.’

  Tillie said, ‘And I’m Tillie Delgado.’

  ‘What a brilliant name,’ said Scarlett.

  ‘I used to be a Thorpe, of course. My little brother never married.’ Paula added, ‘To be precise, he’s not married yet.’

  Evie thought of the kiss outside the cafe, Miss Pritchett’s vigil beneath the willow. Tectonic plates shifted. No longer a philanderer, Jon was simply a man who knew a good woman when he saw one.

  Guiding her listeners in baby-steps through the decision process didn’t detract from its folly. ‘We thought Carl would search for a single mum, not a couple. It would buy us time – time to burrow deeper into our hiding place.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Jon, ‘I couldn’t let them go alone.’

  ‘So,’ said Clive, ‘sister and brother became man and wife.’

  Paula winced. ‘We never shared a bed, or anything icky like that.’

  ‘We know,’ said Clive, ‘thanks to my wife’s sleuthing skills.’

  ‘Oh.’ Paula and Jon shared a non-plussed look. ‘Then what did you think . . . ?’

  ‘We thought you’d had a tiff,’ said Mike. ‘Like married couples do.’

  ‘Why Brown?’ asked Shen. ‘Why not a more glam name?’

  ‘What?’ Clive screwed up his face at this left-field interruption. ‘Why not call themselves Cuthbertson-Twigge and really blend in, you mean? Next time I’m on the run in fear of my life, remind me to leave you at home, darling.’