by Patrick Gale
On one side of the barn, bales of fresh straw were stacked up high over Jane’s head. She had played for hours on these, drunk with their heady smell, until Dougal frightened her off with a warning that children could easily slip out of reach, deep between the bales, and die for lack of air. Against the other walls clustered a collection of wooden wardrobes, chests of drawers, looking glasses and trunks in various stages of restoration and dismemberment. Jane walked over to a dusty looking glass to stare at her reflection nose to nose. Then she heard Dougal talking as he left the house. She knew he would be happy to learn she was adopting him, but sensed that it was wisest not to confront him until her former parents had safely given her up for lost. She glanced around and chose a huge wardrobe to the back of the barn. She slithered over the chest of drawers in front, tugged open the door and slid inside. She scrabbled the door almost shut again with her fingernails, put an eye to the crack and waited. Suddenly her mother’s voice rang out, crystal clear, from the garden.
‘Sarah-Jane? Sarah-Jane?’ There was a muttered curse and she called back to the cottage. ‘She’s nowhere in sight, Brian. Are you sure she wasn’t upstairs?…Well look again, could you?’
Dougal appeared, walking towards the barn entrance with a painted bathroom cabinet under one arm.
‘Oh, er, Dougal?’ her mother called out. He stopped, then walked out of view, towards the fence.
‘Hello?’
‘You, er, you haven’t seen Sarah-Jane, have you?’
‘Jane? Have you lost her?’
‘Well. Not exactly. I just wondered if she’d come over.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Send her back if you see her, would you? We’re meant to be leaving soon.’
‘No problem.’
‘Thanks.’
Dougal came on into the barn, set down the cabinet and gathered up some electric cable which he tidied lazily into loops over his arm. As he left again, Jane suppressed an urge to jump out shouting boo as she had done several times before. She leaned against the back of the wardrobe and listened to her mother’s fretful, now slightly irritated cries.
‘Sarah-Jane? Sarah-Jane? Where are you?’
Jane smiled to herself. She would miss her dolls and her party frocks but at least, after today, she would never again be called Sarah or given a hyphen. Her mother’s cries stopped and for a while there was silence except for the clucking of two hens which had appeared to scratch at the earth and wood shavings in the doorway. Jane’s stomach gurgled and she rubbed it reassuringly. Then she heard her mother’s voice again and her father’s, followed by a knock at the back door of the farmhouse. Jeanette answered. Jane couldn’t make out the words but she heard the one woman’s anxiety being passed on to the other and soon her parents and Jeanette were walking towards the barn. Her mother’s face looked tight and cold, despite the warm remains of the day. Her father strode on ahead.
As he walked in he seemed momentarily subdued by the barn’s looming shadows.
‘Sarah-Jane?’ he asked quietly. ‘Sarah-Jane?’
Jane bit her lip and stared out at him, her fingertips holding the door in place before her. Her mother appeared in the doorway with Jeanette.
‘Sarah-Jane?’ she called out. ‘Don’t be silly, darling. Game’s over now.’
She came forward and opened a large chest then let the lid shut with a bang. Suddenly both Jane’s parents were galvanized into action. They hurried here and there, in and out of Jane’s narrow range of vision, tugging open drawers and wardrobes and shifting things to peer into the shadows. Jeanette stood, hands on hips, and watched them.
‘The hay!’ Jane’s mother shouted. ‘She might have slipped down inside the hay!’ The air filled with straw dust as, grunting, she had Jane’s father set about tugging down bales.
‘She isn’t here,’ Jeanette said softly. Jane’s father came into view again. He started clambering over the chest of drawers to reach the wardrobe where she was hiding. Jane slid into the farthest corner and held her breath as he stretched out a hand towards the doorknob. Then Jeanette shouted, causing him to turn around. ‘Look, I said she isn’t here! Now would you both please get out?’
‘Listen, you,’ Jane’s mother began then seemed to run out of words. Jane heard her panting.
‘Come on, Christine. She isn’t here,’ Jeanette said, reaching out an arm. Jane’s mother gave a little whimper and ran forward in tears. Jeanette led her gently out into the fading light. Jane’s father lingered a moment. He had picked up a small carved box and turned it over in his hands, evidently admiring it. He glanced around, saw no one was looking and, to Jane’s astonishment, slipped it into the deep poacher’s pocket of his waxed jacket. Aimlessly he then opened a few more doors and slammed them shut again. Dougal walked across the yard.
‘Come on, Brian,’ he called. ‘It’s no use. We’ve called the police for you.’
In a sudden burst of anger, Jane’s father turned and shoved hard on the chest of drawers in front of her hiding place. It slid back with a complaint of old wood and banged hard into the wardrobe, slamming the door firmly shut in his daughter’s face. Jane waited a moment, rubbing her forehead where the wood had struck it and wondering whether to cry, then she pushed and found the door stuck fast. She couldn’t shout out to Dougal yet. Not with her father still there. She looked frantically about her in the increasingly musty space and saw light coming through a tiny crack by the hinges. She shifted her position as quietly as she could and thrust an eye to the space. Squinting, she just made out her father’s silhouette as he walked into the yard. Dougal was still there, looking around at the furniture. She would wait just long enough for her parents to get clear then she would call. Or perhaps she would wait until after the police had been? Perhaps she should call out now? She wanted to pee and she was getting hungry, but if the police caught her they might punish her. She might be punished anyway.
She hesitated a moment too long. Dougal turned on his heel, strode out into the yard and swung the barn doors shut with a terrific bang then shot the bolts on the outside. Cars and voices came and went in the hour that followed but through two great thicknesses of wood they might have been two fields away. Jane shouted herself hoarse, then slumped, exhausted and tearful, to the cramped wardrobe floor. She had no coat on and the evening was turning cold. A hen emerged from its roosting place in the straw. Losing consciousness, Jane heard its clucking as it scratched for beetles.
As Brian drove out through Hackney and Stratford, his mood gradually lightened. He had been angry at Chrissie’s refusal to join him on the house-hunting trip since it had been her idea in the first place and he had taken a day off valuable work to make it. Her refusal had been of the kind that, left unheeded, would have poisoned the entire day, however, and there was nothing he disliked more than driving anywhere with her being monosyllabic and hurt in the passenger seat. It might have been fun to have brought Sarah-Jane along at least — they so rarely spent time alone together — but she was coming increasingly to mimic her mother’s every gesture and mood and would only have been monosyllabic and hurt and squeaky.
A trio of Bengali women passed chattering over a zebra crossing before him, the sun catching on flecks of synthetic gold in their swirling, rainbow drapes and Brian reiterated his vow to spend one Sunday soon exploring rather more of the East End than the Whitechapel Gallery and Blooms. Chrissie had bought him a glossy book on Hawksmoor churches but it had gone unread. He drove on towards the motorway, accelerating as the traffic thinned out, and his irritation evaporated. He pressed a button and the car’s roof folded away. It was the latest German convertible, with an engine so quiet one was said to be able to balance a fifty pence piece on it while driving at fifty miles an hour. Brian would have felt absurd testing this claim under his family’s critical eye. It was a pleasure to have the car, as well as an excursion, to himself for once. He was on holiday. He would take his pleasure where he found it. He might try the fifty pence piece test on a quiet side road. He s
lipped on to the motorway and smiled to himself as the speedometer registered ninety with no discernible increase in noise level.
He stopped at Wisbech to pick up details from estate agents. He admired the prettiness of Georgian houses and enjoyed the bustle in the market square — such a far cry from the anger and desolation of shopping in London. Whenever he came to places like Wisbech or Salisbury he bemoaned the fact that he was not a GP or a solicitor or even a dentist — someone who could work equally profitably in a quiet provincial backwater where there was less tension, less overt competition and more time for the good things in life. Chrissie tended to be sharp with him when he mentioned this.
‘You’d be bored,’ she would say. ‘You know you would. You’re a very competitive man. You always have been. You’d wither without the cut and thrust. And there wouldn’t be any good schools for Sarah-Jane. And anyway, what about me?’
Chrissie had a good job too. She travelled so much for it that there was no reason why she should not live in the country, provided she was within easy driving distance of an international airport. All she would need would be a telephone and a fax machine. But when he suggested this, she sighed, impatient but longsuffering.
‘Brian,’ she said, ‘you know what I mean.’
‘What? You mean parties and things?’
‘And things. Yes.’
Brian looked at five cottages recommended by the agents. They were all fairly pretty, certainly, although the austere fenland landscape did not lend itself to a snug village atmosphere in the manner of rolling Cotswold hillsides or burbling Hampshire water meadows. But Hampshire and Gloucestershire were fast becoming part of the retirement belt boom whereas prices in East Anglia could only go up. There was something wrong with each of the cottages he saw, however. They were all close to the road, but that, the agents, had explained, was a fenland phenomenon dictated by the very gradual process by which the need for land had triumphed over the usefulness of water. They had gardens, they were in good condition, they were clearly loved and they were within his price range. The trouble was that too much money had been lavished on them, some of it tastelessly so. Feature fireplaces had been installed, an owner’s pride and joy, as were neo-Victorian garage doors, obtrusively modern fitted kitchens and driveways of pulsatingly orange gravel. Even this would not have been a problem usually. In London, where comfortable convenience was of paramount importance in their hectic lives, he and Chrissie had been grateful to buy a modern house with every efficient luxury already installed, a house needing only the addition of a couple, a child, and their groaning pantechnicon of possessions. Yet Brian sensed that his needs — their needs — in a weekend cottage would be different. They did not want convenience — for that, all his friends would agree, one kept a single house in London and spent one’s surplus on country hotels. They wanted distraction and difficulty. Brian wanted a challenge. He wanted somewhere he could make his own, a place where he could mark out individual territory. (In his weekly work, all-powerful market forces had him exploiting originality in others, and scarcely fostered it in himself.)
He fell to perusing a copy of the Wisbech and District Chronicle. There, amid ragged columns of classified advertisements for land auctions and lawnmower sales, he found what he was looking for.
Fenland cottage in need of loving care, he read. Brick-built, pantiled roof, c.1850. 1 acre. Mature fruit trees. Suit young couple with small child and vision. 35,000 ono.
He called the owners on the car phone and drew up outside their ramshackle farmstead twenty minutes later. He had spoken to a man but it was a woman who emerged as he shut the car door. She had long, straight, blonde hair and was, he guessed, about his age and height. She wore a loose, scarlet dress of rough cotton that clung about her full and braless breasts and swished about her long thighs as she advanced. When she took his hand in hers and said, ‘Hi. I’m Jeanette. I assume you’re the intrepid house-hunter,’ a twinge of lust stirred his loins. ‘Sorry,’ she went on, brushing her palms together, ‘I’ve probably got flour on you. It’s baking day.’
Brian smiled and assured her it was quite all right. There was a streak of flour on her forehead, running into her hair like grey.
‘Normally I get Dougal to show people round,’ she said, leading him across the grass at the roadside. ‘He knows more about building and joists and so on than I do. But he’s getting ready for an auction in Cambridge so you’ll just have to make do with me.’
‘Oh. Well. I’m sure you’ll do very nicely,’ Brian said automatically, then coughed to cover his embarrassment. She merely smiled to herself and passed on.
The cottage for sale was immediately next door, set a short garden’s distance from the road, with a gnarled, flower-strewn orchard behind it. Jeanette explained that she had inherited it from her mother but could not afford to keep it on. She drew his attention to the interesting brickwork then led him around the inside. Their proximity in the tiny rooms was intoxicating. She gave off a heavy scent, composed of baking spices, yeast and another, sweeter odour he could not place. He was vaguely aware of peeling paintwork and the sour taint of damp but found that he was concentrating on her lips more than on what she was showing him. Her eyes were grey and the kohl pressed thickly round their edges and the slight wateriness it had induced, summoned louche memories of earlier, freer days, before Sarah-Jane, before Chrissie. She showed him a stained bath with chipped enamel then followed him into a minute bedroom under the eaves.
‘Now this would do for…Do you have kids?’
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘One. Sarah-Jane.’
‘Ah. Sweet.’
‘Yes. She’d love it up here.’ Brian crouched to peer out of the small, low window at the dyke that lay, a still, dark mirror, along the other side of the road. ‘Do you have children?’ he asked, turning back to her. ‘You and…?’
‘Dougal. No. We’ve tried, but no. Sometimes I catch myself peering into pushchairs at the supermarket and just, well, lusting. I catch myself planning how I could just reach in and take one.’ She had to pass close by him to reach the landing again. She paused looked deep into his eyes and pressed his erection frankly with her wrist and fingertips. ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘I’m tempted.’
Brian felt himself blush hotly. She released him and moved on just before he made a move so that he lunged at nothing. He followed downstairs, watching the swishing of her skirt and wondering how it would be if he seized a handful of her hair and bit into her lips. Was it other people’s babies who tempted her or his all too visible lust? She had blurred the distinctions. His head was full of her scent and the cottage suddenly felt as though it had been designed for smaller, surer-footed creatures.
She stopped in the hall and swung her hair behind her shoulders as she waited for him to come down.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What do you think?’ Her Norfolk accent would have been comical had it not been so intensely erotic.
‘I like it,’ he stammered. ‘I like it very much. I think it’s a good idea.’
‘Are you making an offer, then?’
‘I’ll give you twenty-eight for it.’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Thirty.’
‘Done.’ She held out her hand. As he shook it, a sly corner of his brain, unimpeded by lust, told him he had done her out of a bargain. ‘I’ll put you in touch with my solicitors,’ she said. Then, rather than let go, she lifted his hand and rubbed its palm across her breasts then down to where, he could tell at a touch, she was knickerless.
‘Oh God,’ he groaned.
‘Yes?’ she teased, smiling.
‘Your husband…’
‘Dougal’s off to Cambridge,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t mind Dougal.’
The red dress came off over her head in one liquid movement. He forgot, in his haste, to take his shoes off first, so he was caught with his jeans locked around his ankles and had difficulty keeping his balance. Surprisingly strong, she lowered him to the foot of the stairs and sat astride
him but he became fearful of splinters and they tried leaning in the doorway then moved to the kitchen table.
‘Yes,’ she cried. ‘Yes! Yes!’ and she struck him hard on the buttocks with her boot heels.
At that moment, Brian looked up to see an extremely handsome, pigtailed man swing over the farmstead fence and stride through the orchard towards the cottage. Seeing what they were at, the man stopped, raised a hand and threw them a dazzling smile.
‘Er,’ Brian said.
‘Don’t stop,’ Jeanette ordered.
‘Your husband.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Yes!’ Letting her head hang back off the table’s end, she returned her husband’s smile and, laughing, scaled a peak of pleasure on her own as Brian withered inside her.
“Why don’t we get a little place in the country?’
Chrissie, who had shortened her name when she first perceived it to be a feminization for Jesus’s, had always been driven by things. As a child, she learnt to charm toys from hateful relatives. She had worked hard at school because she liked prizes. Love of things dictated her career, on the sales team of a firm of clothing chain stores. It dictated her choice of husband; Brian earned far more at his record company than her other candidates did in the city. He was also more generous. He would buy her more things. The danger of materialism, as her credit card statements reminded her with cruel regularity, was its infinitude. Love of things was a black hole, a ravenous virus, a galloping soul-cancer. Since to acquire was a compulsive pleasure in itself, quite unrelated to the individual attraction of the things acquired, each acquisition could only leave her hungry for more. A friend of hers, Nicci, had a similar compulsion where the telephone was concerned. Nicci used to spend hours, literally, ringing up friends, acquaintance, even near strangers on expensive services like Dial-a-Pal, Chat-a-Lot and the infamous Hunk Junkie. Eventually, when Nicci’s bank refused to extend her overdraft any further, her mother had declined to bail her out unless she visited a hypnotist. The latter successfully induced an acute jabbing sensation in her ear whenever she held a receiver to it unnecessarily. He also offered a red-hot credit card service, but Chrissie scorned to approach him. She recognized her habit for what it was and made sure she earned enough to stop it turning ugly. She gained an ironic distance on it and, thereby, a measure of control. At a conference in Houston, she bought a Barbara Kruger tee-shirt which proclaimed with witty frankness: I Shop Therefore I Am.