‘Tonight?’
‘Yes.’
She had narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m not someone that needs rescuing, Ted.’
‘I don’t think that,’ he’d added quickly. ‘It’s your choice. I support your right to express yourself however you wish. Creative freedom is important.’ He knew he’d never try to stop her from doing what she wanted. He wouldn’t dare. ‘I simply meant I’m enjoying your company. I don’t want today to end. And that play was … awful. You have to admit that.’
‘You’re not going to get all possessive and weird on me?’
‘No. I don’t believe in holding anyone too tightly.’
She’d regarded him for a moment before throwing her arms around him and pulling him closer. ‘Yes. Let’s hold each other, but not too tightly.’
‘So come on,’ he’d said after a while, pulling away from her, ‘you didn’t answer my question. What would you like to do with your life?’
‘I’m still figuring that out.’
‘Well, you’re young. You’ve got plenty of time.’
‘You talk as if you’re an old man. You’re only a few years older than me.’
‘Nine years.’ Ted had reached into his pocket for his wallet. ‘I’m buying this crystal, for you. If I’m right, I’m giving you an expensive piece of rock. If you’re right, I’m giving you self-knowledge and inspiration. We’ll see, shall we?’
‘Thank you,’ she’d said, accepting his gift with a kiss. ‘We shall see.’
They were already a long way from those incarnations of themselves two years ago. Ted couldn’t help musing on the changes in them both, nowhere more evident than when he glanced at Kit walking beside him down the hillside towards the river and saw the transformation of her body, blooming in early pregnancy. They were going to be parents. The thought was wonderful and terrifying and utterly mind-boggling to him. ‘What?’ she asked him, catching his eye.
‘Nothing,’ he said, smiling.
Through the trees, a building emerged, a small, round stone structure with a low, thatched roof, set a short distance from the water, a wooden jetty nearby with an old rowboat tied to a stump. ‘A boatshed?’ Kit asked.
‘No. It’s an apple store. The estate agent told me there was one down here. The farm used to transport the orchard fruit to market along the river.’
Kit moved closer to the sweet little building and peered through a grimy window. She was surprised to see a cleanly swept room, empty of clutter bar an old table and a few empty wooden crates stacked in a corner. ‘It looks dry.’
‘It would make a lovely summer house,’ Ted said with a smile.
‘Lazy days messing about on the river, picnics and boats?’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘A camp for the band of river pirates we’ll raise, wild bandits ambushing innocent ramblers, adventuring away on the high seas, returning with stolen treasure to keep their slovenly parents in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.’
Ted gave her an appraising look. ‘Do you know, I think there might be a writer in there, trying to get out.’
She laughed and kissed him. ‘I think one writer is enough for any family.’
Turning to look again at the scene spread before them, he noticed the willows on the far bank bowing to the river, trailing their shimmering leaves in the water. The towpath came past the bottom of the orchard and disappeared around a bend in the river. Across the valley, the hills rose up to meet the sky in a spectacular patchwork of countryside. There was no denying it was beautiful, though he also couldn’t deny that the picture Kit painted of their possible future here made him nervous. The rural location, the isolation … it felt a million miles away from the life they lived in London.
Yet they would have each other – and the baby, of course. A new kind of life would open up for them here. Kit seemed so utterly convinced, and so convincing, that standing there beneath the swaying trees and thinking it all through, he knew he couldn’t deny Kit this future. Perhaps this was exactly what he needed to relaunch his writing again. He wanted to believe her, so much: good things were coming their way. ‘Yes,’ he said, drawing her closer and kissing the top of her head. ‘This is the place.’
They moved to Windfalls in late November and woke on their first morning to a fretwork of frost creeping across the inside of the draughty sash windows and an ailing hot-water system that had given up the ghost. The house had been sold to them with many of the previous owners’ belongings left in place, a strange array of furniture: a vast oak desk wedged into one corner of the dining room, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the sitting room, a long oak table in the kitchen, a moth-eaten rocking horse with one missing eye in one of the smaller bedrooms and a huge mahogany bedframe, as big as a boat, that took up most of the master bedroom. While the furnishings were not exactly to their taste, they were grateful for the legacy. Their own scant belongings – a mishmash of the few items Kit owned jumbled up with all that Ted had inherited from his deceased parents – barely grazed the sides of the rambling house, the building swallowing them up like fish disappearing inside the dank, cavernous interior of a whale.
But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Kit spent her mornings wrestling with a temperamental range, burning toast and sometimes herself; her afternoons stoppering draughts with screwed-up newspaper; the evenings shivering under piles of blankets in front of a smoking fire. It didn’t matter because they were dizzy with happiness and high on the novelty of their new home. When Ted woke her with tea in their huge boat-bed and left her to doze and dream as he wandered off to write for the day, Kit lay under the covers and stroked the growing curve of her belly. She watched how the winter light caught in the web of the dreamcatcher she had hung over their bed – a favourite she couldn’t bear to part with when she had left the market stall. She ran her fingers over the rose quartz Ted had given her that she now slept with under her pillow. She told herself that this was enough. Love. Intimacy. They had it in spades. It was enough to move about the house and hear the tapping of the keys on Ted’s typewriter and to know that they were where they were supposed to be.
There were adjustments to make, of course. Gone were the parties and pubs, the Saturdays spent rummaging for fashion in flea markets, the nights spent drinking with friends in basement bars and mornings spent sipping tea and smoking in greasy cafes. Gone too were the cold mornings working at the market, watching shoppers browse her stall before wandering away, and those painfully slow hours modelling naked at the art college, where, lulled by the sound of charcoal moving over paper or brushes caressing canvas, she had killed time by disappearing inside her own head, letting her imagination run wild as she made up fantastical worlds and stories. She sometimes pondered Ted’s question to her: what is that you want to do? But she truly didn’t know the answer. Next to Ted’s obvious talent she felt lacking. He was the real deal. He was the writer. She felt the itch of something unfulfilled building in her, and assumed it was the pull of motherhood calling to her, the need to feather their nest and focus on the new life forming inside of her. She was determined with the move and pregnancy to channel her energies into a new job: she would be a mother, of the very best kind.
In their new home, she distracted herself with the workings of a temperamental sewing machine left behind in an upstairs cupboard, running up wonky curtains for their bedroom and attempting baby clothes and maternity wear from tracing paper patterns. She borrowed a recipe book from the local library and spent afternoons in the kitchen perfecting soups and boiling jams until the kitchen windows were permanently clouded with steam. She sanded down an old oak table she’d found abandoned outside a barn, polishing its surface until it shone.
Ted, desperate to finish another play, moved his typewriter first from the second-storey turret room, then again from one of smaller bedrooms on the floor below, until he finally settled at the huge oak desk left behind in the formal dining room. ‘It’s warmer down here,’ he said. ‘Besides, I like to hear y
ou moving about the house. It makes me feel less lonely.’
She knew Ted worried, sometimes, about the life they were leading in such an isolated place, but the sound of Ted’s fingers bashing against typewriter keys helped to reassure her, in rare moments of doubt, that they had made the right decision. Ted needed to finish a play. Kit knew it. Ted knew it. Ted’s agent, Max Slater, knew it. It had been three years since his last. Without the distractions or pressures of the London literary scene, he would be free to create again, and he had to deliver something new, if only to prove to himself that he could do it again.
She left him in peace until late afternoon when, as the sun began to dip in the sky, they would take a twilight walk together, foraging for firewood, Ted stopping once in a while to pull Kit to him, nuzzling her neck or stroking her growing belly. In the evenings, they huddled together under a blanket, her feet in Ted’s lap while scratched LPs played on the old record player, books splayed all around them.
‘I suppose I should make an honest woman of you?’ Ted asked her one late spring night, peering at her from over reading glasses that made him look so much older than his thirty-one years, sheets of writing paper scattered all about him across the floor.
‘Do I still strike you as the type to need a piece of paper for you to prove your love?’ she asked, patting her huge belly. ‘Besides, how could we afford a wedding? All our money has gone into this place.’
He nodded. ‘I’m glad. I don’t need a ring to know that I am yours, and you are mine.’
That’s exactly it, she thought, smiling back at him. That’s exactly how it was supposed to be. They may not have had much in the way of financial security, but they were happy. Soon, they would be a family of three. The future felt laden with possibility and promise, like the boughs of the trees down in the orchard bearing white blossom.
The baby arrived on a warm May evening, all flailing limbs and piercing wails. They had planned and prepared as best they could, decorating one of the smaller bedrooms a buttercup yellow, sanding and painting an old cot they had found tucked in a dusty corner of the attic and folding cloth nappies into a snowy white tower of promise, but what neither Kit nor Ted could have foreseen was how the arrival of Eve – named for the soft, dusky light that had bathed the valley as Ted had held his daughter in his arms that first time – would disrupt their lives. She was a sweet torture neither of them could have anticipated.
Kit had imagined a strong maternal instinct would rise up in her – natural and protective – the moment she held her baby in her arms, but as an only child herself and inexperienced around babies, she’d found herself flailing in the earliest weeks of motherhood. People had been having babies since time immemorial, and yet Kit could not fathom how anyone survived it. Gone were their serene days at Windfalls, her and Ted in their bubble and the world kept at bay. Gone were those long walks and cosy nights by the fire. Instead, there was a third among them, a third who ran to her own punishing schedule and punctuated their hours with the rudest of interruptions. Night after night, it seemed Eve’s shrieks and cries could not be abated. There were endless thunderous, stinking nappies that had to be soaked and scrubbed in a vile plastic bucket, bottles and laundry and streams of milky puke and always the crying, the tears flowing freely from both mother and daughter.
‘It’s exhaustion,’ Ted said, finding Kit in the kitchen weeping quietly into the squawking bundle pressed against her shoulder. ‘You need to rest. Let me take her.’
‘No, you can’t.’ Eve shook her head. ‘This is my job. You’re supposed to be writing. Besides, you can’t feed her. Only I can do that,’ she said, looking down in misery at the damp circle leaking through her straining bra onto her shirt. ‘It’s the only thing I can do right now.’ Not even her body and its responses felt like her own any more. She had always regarded herself as strong and in control. She had taken a certain pride in her physicality – and yes, she had enjoyed how others had appreciated her form. But all was changed. She was soft, blurred, a picture half rubbed out. She didn’t recognise herself in the mirror.
It was relentless. The cycle of waking, crying, feeding, changing. The sleepless nights sitting in the creaking rocking chair, the baby at her breast and her poor, tired brain capable only of the most muddled lullabies and nursery rhymes pulled from the dustiest corners of her brain. Twinkle twinkle. Polly put the kettle on. Rock-a-bye baby. She sang odd fragments of long-forgotten songs like a demented soul – a woman going slowly mad as the keys of Ted’s typewriter clicked a quiet accompaniment.
Eventually, Ted came up with a plan. Two secretive but industrious afternoons out in the garden and he was standing in front of her in the kitchen, cobwebs in his hair and a look of boyish excitement written on his face. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he told her, ‘you need something of your own. Something more.’
‘More? I can barely cope with what I’ve got right now.’
‘What you need is a little head space away from me and Eve. You know how you need to dream. Come on,’ he said, pulling her up from the chair. ‘Follow me.’
He led her down towards the river and right to the entrance of the old apple store. ‘Go on, take a look.’
Kit threw him a puzzled look before pushing open the wooden door and entering the space. Inside, the room was transformed. The table had been pushed beneath the window and covered with an old curtain from the house. An armchair was nestled in the corner, a crocheted blanket draped across the arm. There was an old apple crate, turned on its side and stacked with a few favourite books, a jug of sweet peas and a pot of paintbrushes. Standing on the windowsill was the piece of rose quartz he had given her, while in the middle of the table was a large sketch pad and an old Olivetti typewriter, a spare of Ted’s.
‘What is this?’ she asked, turning to look at him, still unsure.
‘It’s yours. A room of your own. You can come here whenever you need a little space. To read. To write. To paint. To make your dreamcatchers. To do whatever you like.’
She reached out and pressed a key on the typewriter, hearing the satisfying click of the letter striking the ribbon.
‘Whatever I like?’ She looked at him, confused. ‘What about Eve?’
‘Bring her down here with you, or leave her with me. I don’t mind having her from time to time. Besides,’ he added carefully, ‘I thought you might feel inspired. I thought you might like to try a short story or two. I’ve heard you spinning your stories for Eve at bedtime. You didn’t know I was listening but you’re a good storyteller. I think you might surprise yourself. A little hobby might make you feel more like yourself.’
Kit stared at Ted, surprised and touched by his thoughtfulness, and a little bit fearful.
‘Don’t dismiss the idea yet,’ said Ted, seeing her scepticism. ‘Give it a try. Nothing ventured … an hour away from the baby, sitting down here reading, sleeping, whatever you need … it will be good for you.’
Kit, pushing aside her doubts, gave him a long hug. ‘You are so kind. Thank you.’
More from exhaustion and defeat than any real sense of enthusiasm, she began to experiment with his idea. For a couple of afternoons a week, Ted would whisk Eve away and usher Kit gently down to her new ‘studio’. To Kit’s surprise and yes, annoyance, Eve seemed to settle more easily away from her. Only Kit hadn’t. She had wandered the studio room feeling listless and lost, a dull ache in the back of her throat and the constant sting of tears in her eyes. She flicked aimlessly through the books on the makeshift shelves and spent an age sitting on the wooden jetty, her legs dangling over the river, staring at the reeds drifting beneath the water like the hair of a drowning girl. She pulled branches of willow from the trees and attempted a small, rustic basket, but something didn’t feel right.
She felt that she was wasting time. Rather than help, Ted’s plan had only seemed to emphasise how useless she was in her current state. Who even was she? She should be supporting Ted, enabling him. Was this another way for him to procrastinate, spen
ding hours with his daughter to avoid the unfinished play sitting on his desk? Was this an even faster route to plunging them further into debt?
After a few days, drifting aimlessly about the apple store, she gave up completely. She wandered back to the house, drawn by Eve’s hungry cries. ‘Let me take her,’ she said, lifting the baby out of Ted’s arms. ‘It was a lovely idea, but I don’t think it’s going to work.’ She put the baby to her breast and promptly burst into tears. ‘None of this is working, Ted. I’m a useless mother. Your play will never be finished.’
‘I’ll finish it, love. I promise.’
She lifted her head and threw him a despondent look. ‘I’ve seen it, Ted. I’ve seen the draft sitting there on your desk. You haven’t touched it in weeks.’ She sighed. ‘I thought this would be the place. But it’s not. It’s stifling us.’
Ted, seemingly lost for words, filled the kettle and made tea. He placed a mug in front of her then rubbed her shoulder. His tentative touch made her want to scream. ‘Maybe I should call the doctor?’ he asked gently.
She shook her head.
‘I’m trying, Kitty. Honestly, I’m trying.’
Eve began to cry. Kit unbuttoned her blouse and put the baby to her breast. She turned away. Kit tried again but still Eve fussed and jerked. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she cried. ‘What do you want?’
‘Maybe a little fresh air would help?’ he tried. ‘Take a walk?’
Kit eyed Ted. He wanted her out of the house. Of course he did. How could he possibly work with them hanging about as distraction? Without saying another word, she swaddled a mewling Eve in a fabric sling, tucked a blanket around her and left the house.
She took off through the garden, weaving her way down the orchard, past the apple store standing as another symbol of her failings, until she reached the river. For a moment she stood and watched the water slide silently by. Two elegant white swans appeared from around the river bend, gliding among the reeds. A little behind, a line of scruffy grey cygnets paddled in formation. You make it look so easy, she thought, staring at the proud parents drifting by. She turned away from the water and continued along the towpath, Eve still grizzling in the sling.
The River Home : A Novel (2020) Page 6