by Hilary Boyd
6
Lisa was still decidedly grouchy as they left the rented house: a cute, half-timbered semi-detached cottage in a small Kent village, with beams and a wood stove. It was recent, this enthusiasm of Jack’s for escaping London. An old-age thing, Lisa assured him, teasingly. But he didn’t care. It was bliss to arrive at the weekends and breathe in the cool, fresh country air, to hear the birds sing, to feel the weight of city life fall from his shoulders. He wasn’t tired of life, far from it. But the cottage was a welcome refuge, a place where he could properly think. And, most importantly, it was close to Eve and Arthur.
His wife, however, did not quite share his joy. So there was a weekly tussle as to whether they would go on Friday night or Saturday morning, or at all. Lisa’s wishes usually prevailed and they went on Saturday. But since the weather had been so clammy and hot, his wife had been more amenable to leaving stuffy Queen’s Park after a hard working week.
But as they drove to Eve’s house through the old, sunken Kent lanes – dappled green foliage meeting in a thick arch overhead and cutting out the light – Lisa let it be known with every gesture, every comment, that she was there on sufferance.
‘We don’t have to stay all afternoon, do we?’ she asked.
Jack laughed. ‘Evie’ll think it a bit odd if we gobble down our lunch and then leg it.’ He put his hand on her thigh, which was clad in a pretty floral sundress, and gave it a squeeze. ‘Come on, cheer up! You might find you even enjoy yourself. You love Arthur.’
Lisa didn’t reply.
Jack saw her before she saw him. He and Lisa came round the side of the house, unannounced, to the open kitchen doors and found Stella standing by the table, cutting up new potatoes on a wooden chopping board. They were obviously still hot, because she was holding each one gingerly as she quartered them. There was no sign of Eve or Arthur.
He found it was a real shock, seeing his ex-wife after so long. In some ways she hadn’t changed: still the same dark hair – probably dyed now, he thought – cut in a longish, layered, messy bob, a fringe she always brushed to the side. Still the same intense, violet blue eyes, the fair skin she never put in the sun. But she seemed stouter, he thought, and older, of course, her hands the hands of middle age, the veins and joints more prominent. Like my hands, he thought, smiling ruefully to himself as he wondered how he might appear to Stella.
‘Potato salad? Yum.’ Jack heard his falsely jovial tone and winced. Stella was not much of a cook, but her potato salad with spring onions, capers, parsley and hard-boiled egg had been famous in the past – one of his favourites.
He saw her jump at the sound of his voice. Was she nervous too?
‘Hello, Jack,’ she said, her smile only fleeting as she turned back to the task in hand. It reminded him of how fierce and defended Stella was … or had become. ‘Eve is just getting Arthur up from his nap,’ she added, glancing towards Lisa and giving another smile, this one more convincing. She isn’t sure how to play this, he thought. Which was exactly how he felt.
‘Oh, sorry … This is Lisa, Stella … I don’t think you’ve met,’ he said, as if there might have been a previous encounter that he’d forgotten about. Not likely.
Stella put down the paring knife and the potato she was chopping and wiped her hands on a tea towel that was hanging out of the pocket of her linen trousers.
‘Lovely to meet you, Lisa. I’ve heard so much about you,’ she said, reaching out a hand and bringing her well-remembered charm to bear on his twitching wife. She’s like the sodding queen, he thought, half irritated, half admiring. This isn’t going to end well.
‘Me too,’ Lisa said, her voice rising to meet the challenge as the two women shook hands.
Then they stood in silence, Jack, who was rarely lost for words, unable to think of a single thing to say that might not be contentious to one of his wives.
‘I hear you got married. Congratulations.’ Stella turned to include Jack. ‘You must be thrilled.’
He didn’t miss the hint of amusement in Stella’s voice. Or was it cynicism? Or was he just being paranoid, fearing she could read his mind? She’d always been good at that.
Lisa gave a tittery laugh. ‘It was a bit thrilling, wasn’t it, darling?’ she said, grabbing his hand and moving in to his side, smiling up at him. She never calls me ‘darling’, he thought, his gaze pinned on Stella’s face to see how she was taking Lisa. But Stella’s eyes were fixed on the potatoes again.
There was the welcome sound of his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later, Eve came into the kitchen, carrying a sleepy Arthur who was kneading his eye with one fist, his cheeks flushed, curls squashed to his head. He looked at the assembled adults shyly, then his face lit up when he saw his grandfather.
‘Grandad!’ he said, holding out his arms to Jack.
7
Eve was exhausted, and it wasn’t anything to do with being six months pregnant. She had come in out of the sun after lunch and was leaning against the counter, sweaty and tired, waiting for the kettle to boil. As a child of divorced parents, she always had this fantasy that families who stayed together lived in perfect, loving harmony – even though she knew this was just that, a fantasy – but she had an ongoing sense of grievance that just being with her family for five minutes had to be such an effort.
It was always going to be tricky, she told herself, bringing Mum and Dad together after so long. But that didn’t make her feel particularly sanguine as she watched them out of the window, her mother in a battered, wide-brimmed straw hat, her father slumped in the shade of the umbrella, Lisa stretched out – was she asleep? – on one of the two fold-up reclining sun loungers Eve had picked up from the local DIY store the previous week. Arthur pottered between the adults, a small watering can in one hand, a spade in the other, in his own world.
It looked like a perfectly normal family lunch to the untutored eye. But during the meal Eve had found herself monitoring every word her parents uttered, searching for the familiar tension, for some ill-judged comment that might result in a chilly silence from one or both of them. She remembered the routine so well; it was as if she were ten again.
Today they’d begun with pleasantries:
‘So you’re still with the paper?’ Mum.
‘No, retired nearly a year ago. I’m loving my freedom.’ Dad.
‘I think television has retired me, too, I don’t get commissions any more.’ Mum.
Both laugh.
‘Still in Hammersmith?’ Dad.
‘Oh, yes. I hear you’ve bought a cottage down here?’ Mum.
‘Rented.’ Dad.
‘Good to be able to get out of town.’ Mum.
They both already knew all of this information, garnered piecemeal from their daughter, but on they went, pretending they didn’t, while Lisa sat in aloof silence. It was a valiant effort, and there didn’t seem to be any animosity between them, but Eve still felt as if she were sitting through a bad play.
Her father, bless him, was true to his word. As they peeled giant prawns and dipped them in mayonnaise – Lisa, who claimed an allergy to seafood, looking as if she might keel over just from looking at the juicy crustaceans – he stopped talking only to swallow his food. He was wound up like an automaton, talking nineteen to the dozen about anything and everything, including Brexit.
Then, during the pudding of ice cream with salted caramel sauce and wafer biscuits, her father ran out of steam, or the will to be the cabaret, and the family fell silent. Instead, they gazed at Arthur hoovering up his ice cream with fond, slightly fixed smiles.
Eve saw her father lean forward and say something to her mother as she stepped barefoot on to the warm stones of the terrace, a flowered tin tray laden with tea things balanced in her hands. Lisa was still on the lounger, eyes shut. But Jack was leaning in towards her mother, his voice low.
Eve couldn’t hear what he said, but her mother did not react at all. She seemed not to have heard Jack, her expression unchanged, as though it h
ad been frozen in a previous conversation. And her dad didn’t repeat the question, although he remained leaning forward, staring at her with concerned intensity.
They both started when Eve arrived at the table and set the tray down between them.
‘What were you two whispering about?’ she asked.
The faces they turned towards her were blank. No, not blank, she thought, that implies nothing, a void. She sensed turmoil behind their eyes; Stella looked as if she were holding herself together with considerable effort as she laid out the cups and reached for the glass milk jug.
Eve saw her father sigh and sit back. He pushed his chair away from the table and stood, walked over to where his wife lay on the lounger and dropped a kiss on her forehead.
‘You getting too hot there, Lisi?’ he said, while her mother turned her head away to watch Arthur. ‘I think we ought to be getting off soon.’
Even Lisa looked surprised when she opened her eyes.
‘We haven’t had tea yet, Dad,’ Eve protested.
‘I didn’t mean right now,’ he said, hastily, sending her a smile that did nothing to ameliorate his seemingly powerful desire to be gone. ‘It’s just that Lisa’s really exhausted.’
Seriously? she thought. The woman’s done nothing but bloody rest since she got here. It’s me who could do with a lie-down. But instead she said, ‘No, I’m sure.’ Eve could think of nothing more hideous than Lisa’s job of painting the faces of neurotic presenters and celebrities against the clock every day.
An enervated silence settled over the afternoon. No one even pretended to make an effort as Eve poured tea into mugs and handed round the sugared almonds Lisa had brought as a gift. They all seemed trapped in their own separate worlds. Eve longed to know what her father had said, and why it had upset her mother so much. But she knew she was unlikely to get a straight answer from either of them. It would be a waste of time asking.
That was her lifelong experience. Whenever she’d probed for the real source of the tight-lipped reserve that had existed between them ever since she could first remember, she’d been greeted by replies that were almost insultingly evasive. Then the shutters would slam down.
She was pretty sure of the root cause: her brother’s death. But she knew only what Grandma Patsy – whom Eve had occasionally quizzed on the subject – had told her. And her account was vague and lacking in detail. Eve, as a child, had not known how to push through her family’s seemingly overwhelming desire to duck the subject. So she’d been obliged, eventually, to just let it go.
They’re both old now, she thought. Can they still be angry about something that happened before I was even born? But the distance was there between them. She could almost touch it.
8
June 1990
Stella was half awake when the helicopter began thudding overhead. She saw from the bedside clock that it was only five in the morning and lay there, rigid, praying the deafening thud-thud-thud – seemingly right outside the window of their Stoke Newington house – would not wake Jonny. It was Sunday morning, for goodness’ sake, what on earth were the police doing out there?
She glanced at her husband, but Jack was fast asleep, his floppy auburn hair curtaining his face. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, but asleep he always seemed small and childlike to Stella. She leaned down and gave him a light kiss on his forehead. Jack stirred, took her hand and brought it to his lips, then turned over and slept on.
Not so their son. A soft chuntering came across the baby monitor, at first sleepy and calm, which gave his mother hope that he might fall back to sleep – not that she’d ever known him to do so. But increasingly, Jonny’s voice became more insistent. ‘Mummy … Mummy … Mummyyy!’
Groaning, Stella lifted her pregnant body out from under the warm duvet. What the hell would she do with the boy till the rest of the world woke up?
‘Do we have to go?’ Stella asked Jack three hours later, when her husband finally wandered barefoot into the basement kitchen in his boxers and a faded grey T-shirt.
Jack shook his head and yawned exaggeratedly, stretching his long arms over his head, knuckles cracking. Then he went over to pat his son’s curls – Jonny was on the sofa, thumb in his mouth, engrossed in a tape of Bagpuss at the other end of the room.
‘Probably not,’ he said, sitting down hard at the table, where Stella was eating a piece of toast and marmite, and pulling the cafetière towards him. He looked around for a mug and, not finding one, got up and retrieved a large blue pottery cup from the wooden rack, filling it and taking a long draft of the now-tepid coffee.
Stella knew he was not serious. Jack would do this. Raise her hopes that they might ditch some of the hundreds of social events to which they were both invited – this one was a lunch party in Kent where she would know no one – then backtrack. But he was gazing at her with concern and she thought maybe she looked suitably exhausted this morning to excite his pity.
‘Oh, sweetheart …’ He came round the table and put his arms around her, dropping a kiss on her head. She leaned back into his embrace, letting out a tired sigh. ‘If you’re not feeling up to it … It’s a long trek just for lunch.’
He held her for a while longer, then let her go and picked up his coffee, standing with his bum on the aluminium rail of the gas stove. ‘We won’t go if you don’t want to. But there might be some interesting people there,’ he said, ‘and Jonny would enjoy being in the fresh air. It’s a lovely day.’ He refilled his cup. ‘I could go on my own, I suppose, but that wouldn’t be half as much fun.’
Stella weighed up her options. But the thought of being alone with Jonny all day – who would be as fractious as she was after so little sleep – did not appeal much. It was a glorious summer’s day. Maybe lunch in the country was exactly what they all needed.
‘So who are these interesting people?’
‘Oh, Giovanna knows everyone, and the ones she doesn’t know, Henry does.’
Giovanna Morrison was the long-time editor of a Sunday broadsheet magazine, and Henry was her husband: a Conservative MP for a Kent constituency. This was the reason they’d been asked. Jack had interviewed the politician recently for a profile piece and – Jack being Jack – they had bonded.
‘There’ll be both politicos and trendies, I imagine. Probably half the BBC.’
Stella pulled a face. ‘Kids?’
He shrugged. ‘Henry’s lot are teenagers, I think. But I’m sure there’ll be kids, there always are.’ He smiled at her, his blue eyes very bright and charming to her in the gloomy London kitchen. ‘You know I’ll help with Jonny.’
I hope so, thought Stella, knowing he meant what he said as he said it – Jack was a good father, as good as his work allowed – but she thought it was more probable that he’d be off networking with a large glass of Pimm’s, while she kept an eye on their son.
‘Rosie and Ben might be there …’
She laughed. ‘You’re just saying that.’ Rosie – Stella’s best friend from Bristol, where they’d both studied English – worked for Giovanna’s paper, but in a lowly capacity as a sub-editor.
Jack grinned, holding up his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, you got me. But I don’t want to leave you, Stell. You know I hate going to things without you.’
She tutted and shook her head. She loved him so much. It still seemed like a miracle she had found such a soulmate. ‘You know I’d normally be well up for lunch in the country,’ she said, ‘especially in this gorgeous weather. But …’ She was thinking of work on Monday, and the script she ought to have finished by then for the BBC pre-school children’s series for which she was the writer/director. It was a punishing schedule: scripts to be written and approved, rehearsals, long days shooting a week’s worth of the daily twenty-minute episodes in the studio, editing on the hurry-up and getting them accepted by her boss … Stella loved every minute.
‘Poor sweetheart, I know it must be hard, being pregnant.’
She got up, mollified by his conc
ern, and he put his coffee cup down and grabbed her, pulling her into his arms.
‘Ooh, but I do love you,’ Jack said into her left ear before he kissed her. ‘Mmm,’ he nuzzled her neck, ‘would Bagpuss allow us a quickie, do you think?’
The Morrisons’ weekend place was beautiful. Cosy, rather than the grandness she had expected, it was two Regency cottages knocked into one, set on a hill at the edge of a small village. Painted white with a grey slate roof, it was backed by a mature but rather unkempt garden, in a quiet road that led into the village. The view across the Weald, seen over the mature shrubs and trees that separated the property from a neighbouring field, shimmered in the hot midday sun: peaceful, buzzing with insects and butterflies, so English. But it was a view that would soon be burned on Stella’s mind, forever haunting her with its deceptive prettiness and calm.
Stella looked around at the assembled guests and was glad she’d decided to come, despite the dreary journey out of London. The atmosphere was relaxed and Henry was not the dreaded cliché of a Tory MP. He reminded Stella of Mr Briars, her nerdy chemistry teacher from school, with his neat grey beard and rimless specs, carefully pressed chinos and striped cotton shirt. Giovanna, by contrast, was a magnificent whirlwind of Mediterranean exotic: huge eyes flashing, shiny black hair glinting, lipstick a stunning crimson, her jaunty sun-yellow dress seductively tracing her generous curves. It was as if she’d been dropped into the quiet Kent countryside by mistake. But she and Henry were genuinely welcoming, making a fuss of the sleepy Jonny, guiding them through introductions and fetching them both cold drinks.
Jack made a beeline for an older man with a raucous laugh and a huge belly straining his pink polo shirt and was immediately immersed in intense conversation. Stella thought he might be another journalist, but Jack didn’t introduce her, and she was relieved she could be left to wander after Jonny as he explored the garden. It was the better option, in Stella’s opinion, although it mildly irked her that their son was always her responsibility at these events.