The lingering fragments of the dream are enough to drive her from her bedroom and send her up to the turret room. She settles into the chair, presses the power button on the computer and listens to the whirr of the machine starting up.
There is a stillness to the house, an emptiness that seems to expand with every moment that she sits there in Ted’s worn leather chair, the one she had commandeered from his study the day after he left, the one she had refused to give up to the men who came with the van to claim his possessions. The seat still carries the memory of him, worn into the cushion from all those hours he occupied it while labouring over his writing. It offers comfort. The physicality of him is still present in this one small way, even though most days she is the only inhabitant of this draughty old house, bar Pinter, the sole survivor from Ted’s kitten rescue all those years ago.
She stares at the blank screen in front of her. Just write, she tells herself. Write something. Anything. She reaches out to the keyboard, fingers hovering, diverted suddenly by the sight of her hands. It’s the back of them that stuns her. When did those lines form, the creases gathering around her knuckles and wrists, the shadows of those first age spots? She is not a young woman any more. She knows this intellectually, of course. She is neither mad nor delusional, thank goodness. Yet, sitting there, staring at her hands, at her blunt fingernails and her lined skin, and yes, the lack of jewels or adornment – the lack of wedding ring – she feels every one of her fifty-three years. With the ache of loneliness expanding in her chest, Kit lowers her head to her arms and weeps.
She cries until the sleeve of her silk dressing gown is soaked through, then lifts her head and rubs her face. She lets out a loud groan. She hates herself for this self-pity. If only she could do what she once did and disappear inside an imaginary world – fictional characters feeling fictional emotions – but she can’t seem to conjure herself away from her current pitiful state. Single. Spinsterly. Alone.
Last week, before Lucy had announced her madcap wedding plan, two plumbers had arrived at Windfalls to replace an old enamel bath and fix a broken cistern. Their cheerful presence in the house, the sound of their radio and the banter they had shared, had lifted her lonely spirits in such a way that, as she had waved them goodbye, she had found herself silently willing their van to return back down the drive. ‘Don’t go,’ she’d wanted to cry. ‘Don’t leave me here, to this.’
The reality of her life rises up and hovers before her eyes. This isn’t how she’d imagined it would be. This wasn’t what she’d dreamed of all those years ago, when she and Ted had started their family and dared to envisage what a life together might hold.
‘I’m embarrassed to show you,’ she’d said, when Ted, curious as to what had kept her in the riverside studio for so many weeks, had asked if he could read her work.
‘Don’t be embarrassed. We all have to start somewhere, Kitty.’
Reluctantly, she had handed him the first hundred pages of the manuscript she’d begun after her fateful walk with Eve, then left him to it, strolling the towpath, back and forth, unable to bear the thought of Ted – her wonderfully clever Ted – reading her clumsy words.
He’d been waiting in the kitchen on her return, tapping the table impatiently, the pages strewn before him. ‘Where’s the rest?’ he’d asked, a gleam in his eyes. ‘Show me the rest.’
‘What? All of it?’
‘Yes,’ he’d nodded, urgently. ‘All of it.’
It had been Ted’s idea to send it to Max, his literary agent in London.
‘I don’t know, Ted.’ She’d worried it was too unpolished, too rough for professional eyes.
‘What have you got to lose?’
That question. It was laughable, now. ‘Nothing,’ she’d answered. How wrong she had been. It was, perhaps, the greatest irony that it had been Ted who had encouraged and indulged her, urging her to nurture her creativity in those earliest days, the way you might encourage an ailing patient to take a necessary and restorative turn around a garden. Though of course neither of them could have predicted the success of her first foray into fiction or the rift it would eventually drive between them.
She sighs and leans back in Ted’s chair. The familiar creak of its seatback and the noise of the castors shifting on the wooden floorboards are the only sounds to be heard in the entire house. Margot hasn’t yet returned from her night at Ted and Sibella’s. She glances out to the valley beyond the window and tortures herself with thoughts of Ted, surrounded by love and laughter.
A memory rises and pricks on the surface of her mind. Margot, aged about six or seven, struggling with a sudden bout of bedtime anxiety. It had seemed to rise from nowhere, their once confident little girl suddenly afraid of shadows, disturbed by the dark space beneath her bed, lying awake, sleepless and worried. She remembers how Margot had called for her, and Kit, abandoning her work, would go to her and sit on the edge of her bed. She remembers the fairy tales she would make up for her, revisions of classics where the princesses would wield the swords and slay the monsters. She remembers Margot, lying tucked beneath the covers, wide-eyed and rapt, the sleeve of her pyjama top rolled up to reveal a skinny bare arm, an invitation for Kit to trail her fingers over her daughter’s skin, soothing away her worries, until at last she would let sleep take her and Kit would tiptoe from the room. That sweet little girl. Those shared moments had felt so precious. They had been an anchor, a reminder of her place in the family. Until one night, it had been Ted Margot had called out for, not her, and Kit, though stung, had brushed off her daughter’s rejection. It was fine, she told herself. More time to write.
It was a tug she found hard to bear. A constant push– pull sensation between work and family. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d craved silence and solitude. The eternal family noise, the constant interruptions had meant she’d felt sure she would be happier and more productive if she could shut them all out. Yet as soon as the house became hers – the proverbial empty nest – the silence became unbearable and her words somehow stifled by the quietness. It’s hard to write from an empty place. It was a painful lesson to learn, but the fertile ground of the family, the solid foundation of it underpinning her existence, was the soil she needed to nurture her work, her sense of self. Without it – without them – she is lost.
Of course she’d known what was going on with Sibella, and not just because Ted had done a terrible job of hiding his infatuation. Yes, even someone like her, distanced by her work and closeted away from them all, had intuition enough to know that the man she loved was slipping from her grasp. She could sense it in his distracted gaze, his long sighs and the curve of his back, turned away from her in bed each night. She’d decided to turn a blind eye. What was that saying? If you love someone, set them free.
She remembered their first promise to each other, to hold each other lightly, and had felt worldly and wise, allowing him his fling, knowing how gracious she was being, how generous. She knew that ultimately, she and Ted belonged to each other. What was it he had once said to her: I don’t need a ring to know that I am yours, and you are mine. Who said relationships had to be monogamous? Infatuation with another didn’t have to mean the destruction of their partnership. Their connection was stronger and deeper than that.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. Who was the woman who had caught Ted’s eye? It hadn’t been hard to piece things together. It was a vase Ted had brought home one afternoon, an elegant cream vessel which he had placed in the living-room window and sat gazing at all evening, as if preoccupied by its form. ‘I saw it in a shop,’ was all he offered when she asked. ‘I thought it would look nice here. Don’t you like it?’ In all the time they had lived at Windfalls, Kit couldn’t once remember Ted showing any interest in home furnishings. As soon as Ted had gone to bed, Kit had turned the vase over and read the artist’s looping signature scratched into the dried clay. Sibella Ash.
She had tracked her down to an artisan market in Bath. Slipping out of the house one Sun
day morning, Kit had arrived at the crowded market square and wandered among the stalls, buying a pot of local honey and a pretty woven bag for Lucy’s birthday, before finally spying what she had come for: a stall laid out with an impressive array of ceramic pots, plates and jugs, behind which stood an attractive red-headed woman, dressed in a navy-blue pinafore dress. Certain of her anonymity, Kit had approached casually, and while the woman served another customer, she had allowed herself to inspect the woman’s craft more closely.
They were nice pieces, she supposed, if you liked that sort of thing. Rustic, homely, though showcasing a certain amount of skill. She’d glanced again at the woman, noting her slender waist, her almond-shaped eyes. She was younger than Kit by a few years. Was that what Ted was drawn to, she wondered? Her youth?
‘Can I help you with anything?’ the woman had asked, startling Kit so that she had almost dropped the bowl in her hands. Kit had placed the item back on the table and looked at the woman, and it was then, as the woman’s green eyes had widened with recognition and her face had reddened, that Kit had realised her mistake. ‘It’s Kit, isn’t it?’ the woman had asked in a low voice.
Kit had nodded, surprised that the other woman should recognise her. Though perhaps, she realised, she shouldn’t have been. Her photograph had appeared on enough book covers and magazine articles in recent years. Or perhaps Sibella had simply taken the trouble to research her competition. ‘Yes. I’m Ted’s …’ She’d hesitated. Not his wife. What should she say? ‘I’m his partner,’ she’d settled on. ‘You’re Sibella?’
The woman had nodded.
Kit, realising that she was taking a small amount of satisfaction from the other woman’s obvious discomfort, had eyed her evenly. ‘You do realise that he has a happy home with me, and three daughters who he dotes upon?’
Sibella had had the good grace to drop her gaze. ‘Ted said that you … that he …’ She’d petered out, awkwardly. ‘It wasn’t my intention to come between you.’
Kit had straightened her shoulders. ‘I’m sure what Ted said … what he wants …’ She’d given a hollow laugh. ‘Well, we all know what men want, don’t we?’ She’d fixed her in her sights. ‘Do you have children, Sibella?’
The woman had shaken her head, seemingly unable to meet Kit’s gaze again.
‘No. I didn’t think so. If you did, I’m sure you would tread a little more carefully, treat people with a little more respect.’
‘I’m not proud—’
‘No,’ Kit had interrupted, coldly. ‘I don’t suppose you are. Oh, don’t worry,’ she’d added quickly. ‘I won’t tell Ted that I was here. He need never know that we’ve met. And you may have your sordid little affair with my Ted. I’ll grant him that. But please don’t be so foolish, Sibella, as to think you could ever take him from us. He’ll never leave. You are a flight of fancy, a momentary diversion. Nothing more.’
Before Sibella could reply, Kit had turned and marched away through the crowds, her legs shaking but her sense of triumph to have said her piece rising like a cresting wave. Later that afternoon, as she had knocked the cream vase to the floor, she had felt nothing but the same sweet triumph to see it shatter into pieces. ‘Oh, how clumsy,’ she’d said, unable to meet Ted’s gaze as she’d swept the shards into a dustpan. ‘Unfortunately, darling, I don’t think it’s worth saving.’
She had tried so hard to give him everything. She had tried to turn a blind eye to his indiscretion. What was it was she so guilty of? Working hard? Achieving success? Giving him his freedom? And for what? Ted’s paralysis had seemed to deepen with her own escalating career. His detachment from her, and his desire to be with Sibella, had only seemed to grow the more books she had sold, until the day he had confronted her with his decision to leave.
That she had been devastated was an understatement. Kit didn’t know who she was without Ted. She didn’t know why she was at Windfalls. The dream they had shared dissolved with his departure, and of course their girls growing up and spreading their wings. A ‘momentary diversion’, she had told Sibella. She wasn’t ever supposed to be his future.
To hide from the pain, she had disappeared into her work. She had submitted to the pull of her creation, absorbing herself even more deeply in her writing. Kit took to spending long hours in the studio, working on the manuscript, moving her characters like chess pieces playing out a complex game, all the while avoiding the pain of her own failed relationship. The seventh book was going to be her best yet. She felt it in her bones. Kit’s own life might be falling apart, but her heroine, Tora, was reaching the pinnacle of her story. Her character had seen off countless threats and foes. She had become a mother in the sixth volume and the transformation – the maternal power – had added a compelling new dimension to the character and the writing. Kit had felt inspired in a way she remembered from those earliest days in the studio. After a day of escape into Tora’s world, she would lift her head, amazed at the speed in which the day had passed, and leave her riverside writing studio, drained but content, eyeing the growing stack of typed pages with a sense of satisfaction, certain it was her best work yet and thrilled to know that her vision was nearing completion.
Only she had neglected one important piece of her own real-life puzzle. Margot. She had failed to notice Margot’s loneliness and despair at Ted’s departure.
It still caused Kit physical pain to remember the spring night she had looked out of the kitchen window and seen the flames rising up through the trees in the orchard. Lost in her own thoughts, she had seen the flickering orange fire dancing down in the valley and had stood for a moment, entranced. How beautiful, she had thought. But as the flames grew in strength and the black smoke began to billow from the trees, Kit had snapped out of her trance. Realisation dawned. A fire, down by the riverside. Gripped by a terrible dread, she had run through the orchard to the studio and found the entire building engulfed in flames and Margot crouched on the jetty, looking dark and deranged. If she could have entered the building and grabbed even one page of that novel she had poured her broken heart into she would have, but the old apple store was an inferno and it was clear nothing would survive the force of such wilful destruction. Her only draft – her best work yet – had gone up in smoke and Margot didn’t seem to have any explanation for what she had done. ‘He’s gone,’ was all she’d said, as Kit had stood over her, shaking with rage. ‘He’s gone.’
‘I know he’s gone,’ Kit had screamed at her. ‘He left me too, you foolish, foolish girl.’ She’d stared about, aghast as the flames had risen and the sparks of her work had spiralled away into the sky. ‘As if this could have brought him back!’ Kit didn’t think she could ever forgive Margot for such a cruel betrayal.
All this before the final kick in the guts when, just a few months later, Ted made his triumphant return to the West End. Though she nursed her own deep wounds and maintained a hurt and frosty silence with him, she’d had the good grace to find an iota of joy for Ted’s achievement. She knew what it would mean for him, after all these years, to have finished a play. It was only when the first reviews of Attrition had started to appear, and she had understood what exactly his new work was about, when the phone had started to ring with sly requests from journalists asking for comment and opinion on the themes of her ex-husband’s play (‘not my ex-husband – we were never married’) that she had begun to understand what he had done. For Attrition, it transpired, was a contemporary spin on the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. It was an exploration into the descent of a man, eroded slowly by a more powerful, more successful lover. A well-known Hollywood actor had been cast as the West End lead and the play was being hailed by critics as a gruelling examination of the collapse of a once loving relationship, a dissection of the power struggle between a man and woman and a topical analysis of modern-day gender roles and politics. The broadsheets were calling it a revelatory modern masterpiece. The tabloids were calling it ‘sensational’ and pored over it as if it were a free for all on the machinations
of Ted and Kit’s failed relationship.
When, a few weeks later, Margot had appeared in the kitchen, just shy of her seventeenth birthday, and announced that she too was leaving home, there hadn’t seemed any point arguing with her. Kit could barely stand to look at her still. But with Margot’s departure, it was as though the final door had slammed shut on Kit. Was it any wonder, after the last few years, that she had constructed walls around herself? She had built her defences high, and retreated behind them, certain that she would not risk such personal or professional pain again. In the new reclusive world she inhabited, her only battlegrounds were loneliness and middle age.
This weekend, in front of Lucy’s wedding guests, will be the most public she has been in years. She hopes she is ready. It will be hard to face them all: Ted, Sibella, Margot. But she will cope. She will do it for Lucy. This weekend is not about her. Perhaps the greatest gift she can give Lucy is to put aside her own pain. She can keep it hidden and buried – as she has become so adept at – and maintain her uneasy truce with Margot. She will do her best to welcome Sibella to Windfalls, without fuss or histrionics. As much as it hurts, she will do it for Lucy. She will prove to them, as much as to herself, that she can be the mother she knows none of them believe her to be.
Blinking in the morning light, she turns away from the window and rests her gaze on the blank computer screen in front of her. The MacBook she now works on sits waiting. A hard drive hums beneath the desk, next to the printer she uses to spit out backup hard copies of her day’s work. Somewhere, an invisible ‘Cloud’ waits to gather up her words and store them safely. Eve and Andrew had come one day and set it all up for her. It feels like an alien way of working, a world away from the satisfying thunk of typewriter keys hitting ribbon, but at least, should she find herself ever putting words down, they will be kept safely.
Perhaps someday, she will find a way to return to the Rare Elements story. Perhaps somehow, she will find it in her to battle the terrible block she has faced these eight long years. Perhaps, at some point, the words will start to flow again. Oh Ted, she thinks, I understand now. I understand so much.
The River Home : A Novel (2020) Page 16