by Patrick Gale
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘Cambridgeshire,’ her father said.
‘We’re about to cross the border into Norfolk,’ her mother added.
‘Where?’
‘Any…minute…now! Here! Now we’re in Norfolk.’
They passed a sign. The road looked just the same, as did the countryside. Flat. Flat. Flat.
‘Where’s Norfolk?’
‘East Anglia. On the East coast.’
‘And why did we have to get a cottage here?’
‘You mum liked the idea.’
‘And your dad found the perfect place.’
‘And we got it at a bargain price,’ her father went on. ‘Can’t think why no one else has discovered this bit. I mean, it was a bit grim having to drive out through the East End, but I suppose, if one were to keep clear of the rush hours and so forth, it wouldn’t be so bad…’
Her parents lapsed back into one of their usual, incredibly tedious conversations, cobwebbed with adult impenetrables like Hangar Lane Gyratory System and Miles Per Gallon and Post War Architecture. They were not nearly there. Her mother had lied again. Sometimes she seemed to resent Jane’s falling asleep in the car and wake her for the hell of it. Jane fell to pulling Jones’s hair again then tried to push out one of the doll’s eyes with its own, miniature thumb.
She had twenty-nine other dolls at home and a hammock and an exercise bicycle and her own fridge for cold drinks and her own colour television and a child size portable video camera and her own stereo system with compact disc player and remote control facility. She had her own bathroom, with a bidet and an extensive menagerie of clockwork bathroom toys and a whole wall of fitted cupboards to house the dress collection she planned to amass over the years to come. She had piano lessons and ballet classes and went to the cinema often and had only been refused a pet because her mother said she was too young to look after one. They had a lovely house in Islington, with two garages and a gym and both her parents seemed happy with their jobs. Why then had they seen fit to buy — another adult impenetrable — a Little Place in the Country?
‘Sarah-Jane? Sarah-Jane? Look! We’re here! There it is!’ Jane looked up from her ponderings. They were pulling up on the outskirts of a village. There was a farmhouse in a cluster of outbuildings overgrown with creepers and long grass. To their left crouched a small, red-brick building not unlike a rather cheap doll’s house, set near the road in a patch of windswept garden.
‘Oh,’ said Jane.
‘Well you could show a little more enthusiasm,’ her mother snapped.
‘Don’t bully her,’ her father said. ‘She’ll like it when she looks around. Come on. We can unpack later.’
He unstrapped Jane’s harness and lifted her down to the grass verge. She followed as he walked arm in arm with her mother up the garden path. A dead rat glistened with flies under a rose bush but Jane said nothing. She would save it to come back to later.
The house was quite nice inside. It smelled of wet paint and there was only one bathroom, but her bedroom under the eaves was so tiny and had such a small window that it reminded her of the houses she liked to build under her mother’s dressing table or inside the airing cupboard. She began to understand her parents’ enthusiasm. It was all a game.
‘Do you like it, then?’ her father asked her.
Jane bounced on her bed to make it squeak.
‘When are we having lunch?’ she asked.
‘She likes it,’ her mother said. ‘Thank Christ for that.’
And Jane had to watch while her parents kissed exaggeratedly like a couple in a cartoon.
They were busy with suitcases and spice racks after lunch and Jane found herself repeatedly in their way. So, responding to their impatient suggestions, she slipped out to play by herself in the garden. At the back of the house was a cluster of tired fruit trees. An old tyre hung from one and she amused herself for a while by swinging on it until she felt dizzy. She tried an apple or two but they were hard and their sour juice made her tongue curl. Then she found a congregation of slugs glistening in the rhubarb patch and had fun squashing it with a stone. She needed to pee suddenly and felt pangs of hunger (lunch had been olives and salad) so she started back towards the house. Her parents were shouting at each other however, and she was frightened to go in. Instead, she relieved herself in some bushes below one of the windows. Crouching on the dry earth she gradually became aware of a delicious smell; warm, sweet, spicy. It was coming from the shabby farmhouse next door. She followed it across the garden as far as a broken part of the fence and stopped there to sniff again. The smell curled around in her head and made her stomach gurgle. The gap in the fence was not wide and she had to squeeze and shove to force her belly through.
Once she was on the other side it seemed impossible to go back the way she had come. So she went on. She was enchanted to find a small zoo at large in the yard. A cat was dozing on a bale of hay. Another was draped across a sack of fertilizer, swishing its tabby tail. An old sheepdog rose from his place by the back door to sniff and lick her face. There were ducks on a greenish pond and hens scratching in the earth. A donkey brayed and wheezed in a paddock where a huge black horse watched her from the shadow of a tree. A goat, safely tethered, paused in its munching to fix her with reptile eyes and she counted three cows grazing in the field beyond the paddock. She stopped to pat the dog and pet the cats, then she followed the delicious scent — which was making her quite ravenous now — to the open back door.
A batch of sugary Chelsea buns and two seed-dusted loaves were steaming on a wire rack below the window. Further into the room, in the shadows, a woman and a man were seated, one behind the other. She was gently combing out his black hair, which was nearly as long as hers. They were both beautiful. Not like her mother and father, who were beautiful and handsome respectively of course, but beautiful in a new, unsettling way. They didn’t look altogether clean and the woman wore no make-up, but they had a kind of glow. It brought Jane to a sudden, hurtful realization that her parents might not be the most attractive people she would ever meet. The man had been working on the farm. He had no shirt on and there were streaks of mud among the black hairs which formed whorls on his chest where her father’s was pink and smooth. His eyes were shut with pleasure but the woman saw Jane and smiled without stopping her combing.
‘Hello,’ she said, in a faintly mocking, low voice. ‘Who are you?’
The man opened his eyes briefly but did not move.
‘“I’m Jane,” said Jane. “We live next door now. Can I take a bun?”
‘Sure,’ the woman said and, as Jane carefully picked the bun nearest her and sank her teeth into its sticky crust, she twisted the man’s hair into a glossy braid and kissed the nape of his neck. The dough was still warm and one or two currants tumbled from its torn surface to the floor, where the sheepdog licked them up and sat, with a barely discernible whine, to wait for more. The man opened his eyes again then pushed back his chair and stood. He winked at Jane and walked out across the yard to the barn, where he started using a noisy machine.
‘Like your bun?’ asked the woman, grinning now.
Jane nodded vigorously. She would have liked another but knew this was best left for a sort of going-home present.
‘I’m Jeanette,’ the woman said. ‘And that was Dougal. Do your parents know you’re here?’
‘No,’Jane told her. ‘They’re busy.’
‘Well,’Jeanette winced, ‘so am I, in a way. But you can watch if you like.’
‘Yes please.’
‘Come and sit on a chair, then, instead of standing there like a pudding.’
Jane came forward and clambered onto a kitchen chair. The woman, Jeanette, in whose honour she had already resolved to rechristen one of her better-favoured dolls, had switched on a light in a corner of the big, low-ceilinged room, and was turning her attention to a chest of drawers. It was painted dusky blue all over and someone had started to decorate it further with litt
le clumps of painted leaves.
‘Are you a farmer’s wife?’ Jane asked.
Jeanette chuckled.
‘No. The animals are just pets and the field and paddock are all the land we’ve got really. This is how we make our living. Well. Our sort-of living. We buy old bits of bashed up wooden furniture at auctions. Dougal mends them and does the base coat and I paint on the twiddly pretty bits.’ She shook her yard of blonde hair away from her face and tied it impatiently in a handkerchief, then she reached for a saucer of paint and a brush.
‘What are you doing now?’
‘Pull that chair closer and I’ll show you.’
Jane moved closer and watched Jeanette paint leaves and buds and tendrils. She had a smell that was almost as good as the buns — Jane’s mother never wore scent and stopped Jane’s father wearing it either because it made her sneeze. There were other good smells in the room besides Jeanette and the buns. Bunches of pungent leaves were hanging from the beams to dry and there was a fragrant mound of orange peel and a pot of cooling coffee on the table. Jane watched, fascinated, as Jeanette’s long, dirty fingers made deft twists this way and that with the brush. Dougal stopped using the machine and began to make gentle taps with a hammer. He sang to himself as he worked. Jane pulled her feet up onto the chair beside her. The good smells, the bun and the pleasing sense of doing nothing while adults laboured, conspired to bring a delicious drowsiness over her. For a few lucid seconds before she nodded off, she wondered why her life was not always like this, why this sense of well-fed contentment was so unfamiliar.
When she awoke, the cupboard was all painted and her parents were in the room making clucking, apologetic noises to Jeanette.
‘She’s been no trouble, honestly,’ Jeanette was saying.
‘We had no idea. I’m so sorry!’ Jane’s mother exclaimed.
‘No bother at all,’ Dougal added. He winked again as her father swung her up against his shoulder and followed her mother outside. He winked privately, so that no one else noticed.
‘Come again,’ Jeanette murmured, with her discreet smile. ‘Pop round.’
Her parents rarely came again however. In the weekends that followed, they were preoccupied with adult impenetrables — Hand Blocked Paper, Damp Course, the demise of a Feature Fireplace and some lengthy and bad-tempered dealings with someone called Artex Removal. But Jane came. She could barely wait for each weekend to begin in order to squeeze through the gap in the fence and visit her new friends. Dougal let her stir paint and showed her how to milk the cows and goat. Jeanette taught her to plait her own hair (which seemed to make her mother cross). She gave her handfuls of bread dough to knead into shapes and bake and she used to stretch a sheet of yellowed lining paper across the kitchen table for Jane to paint on while she worked at her grown-up painting alongside her.
Jane’s parents were perturbed at first, in case Jane were proving an embarrassment, then they seemed to accept the idea that Jane had adopted a second family. They chuckled, in her hearing, about the Hippies and pounced on any small infelicities that crept from their neighbours’ speech into their daughter’s. (Jane, uncomprehending, told Jeanette that her mother said that Jeanette had a terrible Norfolk burr and Jeanette laughed and fed her some cooking chocolate.) That Jeanette could be handy as a child-minder was swiftly appreciated. Jane’s mother was often unable to come to the cottage for more than two weekends in a row. On these occasions, Jane’s father would bring work with him and closet himself with the portable computer in the dining room while Jane went to play with the animals she now thought of as hers. It was not unheard of for Jeanette to invite him to come over with Jane for long, boozy meals in the farmhouse but Jane preferred it when he stayed on his side of the fence. She was not above keeping a proffered invitation to herself and passing back some fabricated apology so as to keep her friends to herself.
When her nursery school began its holidays she was even left behind one weekend to spend seven glorious days as Jeanette and Dougal’s guest. She fitted quite easily into their routines, rising and retiring when she felt like it, washing as little as they did and eating whatever pleasantly meatless meals Jeanette placed before her. Two things set the seal on the week’s pleasure for her: lying awake listening to the loud sighs and open laughter that came from their bedroom — a far cry from the embarrassed coughs and inexplicable creaks that came from her parents’ well-appointed own — and being woken by Dougal at the dead of night to watch one of the cats giving birth.
Her parents joined her for a fortnight’s holiday after that and brought with them bad weather, bitterness and altercation. While Jane sheltered, bored, from the rain, they argued. Jeanette’s name was raised as was that of a young Frenchman who lived with their neighbours in London. Adult impenetrables to do with Planning Permission, Fraud, Silk Purses and Sows’ Ears crackled on the air over Jane’s head and when she tried to slope off to Jeanette and Dougal, as had become her habit, she was faced with an inexplicable edict.
‘You are not to go round there any more, Sarah-Jane,’ her father commanded. ‘You are not to see them. Do you understand?’
Stunned, Jane retreated both to her room and to the temporarily abandoned solace of her dolls and their unstinting fidelity. She sat them in elegant half-circles around her on the bedroom floor, trying not to listen too closely to the angry phrases that followed her up the stairs.
‘I’ve a good mind to go round there and have it out with him.’
‘Him? You think he’s behind it? Oh no. It was her. Her name was on that form. It was her application for planning permission that had so carefully been allowed to lapse until we’d had the searches done. She’s the one that took you for a ride. Simple, unworldly hippies my arse. She saw you coming a mile off and if you hadn’t been blinded by lust —’
‘Well if we’re talking lust, I hardly think last week’s sordid little revelation leaves you in any position to —’
Jane quietly shut the door to keep out the sounds of their anger and climbed on the bed with a pad of paper and some crayons. She drew the perfect house where she and the more attractive of her dolls would live. They had a gym and a swimming pool and a bathroom apiece and there were dogs and kittens and a cow and a donkey and a place for Jeanette and Dougal to make her buns. Her parents, perhaps, might live next door. In a slightly smaller house because their needs were simpler and their natures undeserving.
Her mother came upstairs after a while, her hair newly tidy and lips newly red, to announce that the three of them were going to drive to the seaside for tea. For the rest of the week an unnatural parade of normality was mounted. Where they would formerly have amused themselves, they now did everything as a closely bound trio, or, rather, as a pair with Jane a necessary buffer zone. They had picnics and a boat trip. They made apple chutney and visited historic buildings where Jane was rewarded for her boredom with cake or ice cream. There were no more arguments apart from quickly stifled bickering about road directions and timetables. Jane saw nothing of Jeanette and Dougal — there was no time and the ceaseless activities left her whimpering only for sleep.
On the last evening of the holiday, Jane’s mother delivered a startling piece of news. Jane’s father had returned in high excitement from taking a phone call and a bottle of champagne had been opened. Jane could smell it on her mother’s breath as she bathed her.
‘Sarah-Jane, you do realize, don’t you, that we’re going back to London tomorrow and we won’t be coming back here?’
‘No.’
‘Well we won’t, you see. We’ve just managed to sell the cottage.’
‘But why?’
‘We had to. It turns out the naughty woman who sold it to your dad kept lots of bad things secret.’
‘What bad things?’
‘Oh. Well. That there are going to be a lot of horrid new houses on all the land around here. Things like that.’
‘Oh.’
‘So it was very important to sell quickly and get a good price be
fore anyone else found out. Daddy’s found a buyer today and we’ve accepted the offer. It’s a shame but there it is. Now. Let’s wash your hair so it’s as shiny as a little doll’s. You are getting plump, darling! We’ll have to put you back on salads for a while. Whatever can that Jeanette have been feeding you?’
Jane started to ask why her father had kept bad things secret too but her mother had turned the shower on and her eyes and mouth threatened to fill with water. She cried while her hair was washed and grizzled as her mother rubbed her dry. But she quietened down when allowed a dusting of Chanel talcum powder and by the time she was tucked up in bed in her tiny room for the last time, she was utterly calm. She had forged a plan.
‘Do you want me to read you a story?’ asked her mother, who had unthinkingly ascribed her tears to a surfeit of tiring pleasures during the day.
‘No,’ Jane told her and enjoyed her mother’s moue of disappointment at the small rejection. Left alone with the eerie reflection of her night-light in her dolls’ eyes, Jane dwelt on her simple plan. She had tried for a while to share herself with two households. Now thoughtless decisions from adults left her no option but to choose. She had already transferred her loyalties from the household and parents she was born with to those she coveted. Now she had merely to follow through with a bodily transfer. She would swap families. Like any nicely brought-up girl faced with a plate of cakes, she would reach for the sweetness that lay closest to her.
In such familiar territory, the defection was easily performed. As Jane had suspected, the next day was taken up with frantic preparations for removal men. Many boxes of books had remained packed all summer for want of shelves but there were china and glass to wrap and linen to sort and pictures to protect. When she slipped out of the house after a perfunctory late lunch and squeezed through the gap in the fence, she was not missed therefore. She hid at the side of the barn and watched until she was certain that both Jeanette and Dougal were in the house, then she darted around the corner and through the barn door. Jules, the dog, stood and wagged his tail to see her but he was still tethered by the back door to keep him from bothering the kittens so he could not give away her whereabouts.