Someone's Wife

by Linda Burgess

  He used to be in charge.

  He’s safe now. Retirement village. Mallory Village. Used to be a girls’ school, didn’t it? Isn’t that why there are still lacrosse nets in the shed by the pétanque court?

  That woman. Watch out for widows. Watch out for widows bearing scones, that’s what his friend Lord Lucan said. Before that nasty business. Oh Lucky—where are you now?

  The woman says she was made by Bly too. But they all say that. Sucking up. She says she came to stay with her cousins near here. The Enchanted Wood, that’s what they called it. How funny, she says. Faraway Tree, she says. What a hoot! She … Connie. She’s Connie. She says her cousins made her believe there was a magic tree nearby. You go up it. A land comes past the top. You’ve got to make ruddy sure you get down in time. Else you’re pet food. There’s a slide, she says.

  What nonsense.

  She says that it’s all that retrieved memory stuff. Made-up stuff. She says it’s bullshit.

  She shouldn’t swear.

  Connie says she’s made by Bly too. But he wouldn’t know. Everyone wants to be. But he’s closed his mind to all that. The past. He’s steered well clear. The so-called ‘Secret’ Seven. Barney someone. That little freak called Noddy. Mr Galliano: #me too. Adventure this adventure that. Banking was much less complicated.

  But if this was a girls’ school … perhaps there are tunnels?

  Where’s George these days? Anne? Dick?

  They’ll visit. They’ll probably visit.

  Oh Bly. My darling Bly. Why have you forsaken me?

  Well, thinks Dick. If they don’t know these are fakes, then they deserve what they get. The fucking hoi polloi, thinks Dick. The great unwashed. Wouldn’t know a Terracotta Warrior from one of the seven dwarves.

  Used to treasure the old. Fine old inlay. The detail.

  It started to go downhill when people stopped wanting stuff owned by their betters. Wanted ‘country’. Old pine scrubbed to death in a miner’s kitchen. Turned out most wouldn’t know an old table from the Cotswolds from one made in Shanghai.

  Then they stopped even wanting country.

  Ikea. He blames Ikea.

  Decent folk never had to buy their own stuff. All around the country Mummies and Daddies just passed some good stuff on. Granny’s stuff. Great-granny’s. If they could afford to. How he’d loved driving round the country in the dear old Bentley buying the stuff people were selling to pay death duties. What treasures he’d found.

  Bly. He blames Bly. For lots of things really. She created him as athletic—he always knew this and it’s made him a teensy bit vain. The sporty one. And sometimes a good old-fashioned problem-solver. He should’ve been important in the City, but she’s made him just a bit artistic. A bit of a limp-wrist. He could’ve been an architect. Done things like that chap in Grand Designs.

  Wrong time, wrong place. As usual.

  She made him sporty so how come she also made him get … plump? All right. Portly. FAT! It’s not as if she ever had a talent for irony.

  And how’s he ended up alone? Anne’s the carer: how come she’s not caring for him? She’s got the space in her life, after all. They’re family. The trouble with Anne is she can’t be bothered getting into her car and driving here. Too much time spent on moping. Too much poor me.

  There’s an email from that place where Julian’s ended up. Oh Bly, if you hadn’t buggered off this wouldn’t have happened. Oh fuck. They’re saying Ju’s lost his marbles. They want a family conference. To discuss where he’s to go.

  Well, I can’t have him here.

  Anne’s at the letterbox and it’s the postie. How sad—she’s always loved the mail, letters from school friends, cards from godchildren abroad. But no one sends letters. Not real letters. Not anymore.

  She dreads mail now. Those letters about money. How’s she meant to have a clue what they’re on about? Oh Pip, why did you have to die? She never dreamt she’d outlive Philip. Larger than life.

  What does foreclosing mean? What’s ademption? Arbitrage? What’s surety? Who’s her funds manager? What has she signed? When? Didn’t Mr Jones—so kind—tell her that Russia was the place to buy bonds? Failsafe, he said.

  Oh, she shouldn’t have had to deal with such unpleasant things as money. Philip’s allowance had always been generous. So easy to get the same amount of money to manage on each week.

  Daddy with Alzheimer’s. Then Mummy with that horrid, horrid stroke. Thank goodness she was there to help. She’s done her duty. Then Uncle Quentin, with George off doing important things around the world: it was on her shoulders. He’d got rude and cross and wasn’t a bit grateful.

  All dead now.

  All Daddy’s money gone on care. When they got too heavy to lift. She would’ve kept them at home if only she could have.

  Can’t blame Bly. She only created what she knew about. Girls didn’t need to know about money, back then. Girls just needed to be kind. Occasionally bold. Bly made George bold.

  Why not me? Even a tiny bit bolder?

  She hates that parrot. On the shelves above Philip’s desk. Kiki. Stuffed. Philip loved birds. The death of him. With his binoculars. The Channel looking glorious in the spring sun. He’d just shouted Super! Leach’s storm-petrels! and she’d looked up from setting out the picnic—bacon and egg pie—and there’d been that awful, awful sound of shoes skidding on pebbles and he’d called, I say! A bit of a shout. And then nothing.

  Gone.

  No children. She would’ve adopted, but Pip stood firm: only one of Bly’s creations. By then, they were pretty thin on the ground.

  The postman says Good morning Mrs Mannering, and says how well her hollyhocks are doing and how there isn’t a garden to beat hers. Those delphiniums.

  All those envelopes with plastic windows.

  And one from Mallory Village. It must be about poor dear Julian.

  Can’t just put this one in the drawer by the tea towels. This one will have to be opened.

  Don’t be a bloody idiot, Kirrin. They’re tanks! George is running towards the sound of fire and the others are all going the other way. Well, bugger them. That rumbling. The action: that’s where the photos are. No children, please. War’s war and all that, and one just has to accept collateral damage. But easier to concentrate if one doesn’t have to jump over dead children.

  You don’t get the Robert Capa gold medal by behaving like a girl’s blouse.

  You never know when things’ll turn rotten. Look at the Twin Towers. Look at people in white vans running amok on bridges. It’s not all tanks.

  Mike and Suzy Kavanagh. They wanted a baby. Journalists. Not war reporters. They’d taken Karla. She’d hardly had to ask.

  Her dark cap of hair. Dark-eyed like her father. Serious eyes. Beautiful eyes. She can still smell the baby. Its soft head nuzzling under her chin.

  She should have given her up. She’d had to. What sort of a life …?

  Bloody Bolivia. He’d been safe in Prague. Executed. A day after they’d captured him. He’d told them not to shoot. That he was worth more to them alive than dead.

  One night. Just the one night. He never knew there’d been a baby. He had his own kids. Four. Never stopped talking about them.

  Just one night.

  Suzy and Mike. Visiting Karla in Bosnia. Things almost all right by then. Stopping at the market, probably to just get some vegetables. Parked right beside a car bomb.

  Gone. Three in one go.

  Karla dead at 30.

  Then there’s her phone ringing and some fuckwit’s asking her how her day’s been so far and the tanks are firing and she’s saying fine thank you and this idiot woman from somewhere in South England is saying she’s matron of Julian’s retirement village and they have to have a family conference, and George says, You know I’m only a cousin?

  There’s a lot of plot in-between. There’s people ripping off others. There’s all the Famous Five working out what’s their individual challenge. There’s the usual stuff about t
unnels, and Dick is kidnapped. There’s the fight between the residents of the village and the developers who want to destroy the Enchanted Wood. There’s a happy ending of sorts. And it’s occurred to me that the lands that come to the top of the Faraway Tree are not unlike … Heaven.

  Years pass as I work out in a half-baked sort of way what to do with it. There’s no doubt that it has to be filmed in England, but there’s an even larger problem which I allow to defeat me. It’s called copyright but it’s actually copyright-plus: like Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton is no longer a writer but a brand. She’s owned. I don’t have the necessary chutzpah for the fight it might take to get them to allow my idea. I’ve taken them to the end of their lives. Isn’t that enough? They’re here in my head with me, and as far as I know, we’re all happy.

  My publicity friends at SKY TV invite me to Auckland to join a group of 40 or so people who will dine with visiting actor Hugh Bonneville and his wife Lulu. Many in the room are journalists and Bonneville has a watchful look on his face; he’s left England just after the breaking of the sort of story the tabloids love. A grubby sex scandal, of course. A hint of homoeroticism. His wife’s eyes are moving smoothly from side to side—no sniper is going to get past her. But those in the room either don’t know about the scandal or decide to give the poor sod a break.

  I do know about the scandal. I’ve googled him, to see what I should know about him if I happen to get into a conversation. I send an email bristling with exclamation marks to Jane Bowron, my colleague from the Dom Post who’s also going to be at the dinner. Have you seen?? She just has, too.

  The knowledge does add a certain piquancy to the evening. As the hours pass—and Jane and I, along with the CEO of SKY TV are sitting at the same table as Hugh and Lulu—Hugh relaxes. It’s time for his speech and he gets up, and in the voice of one who has spent the last few days getting into his car with a folded newspaper over his face, he thanks the press in the room for not giving him the bloody hard time that those bastards in England have. We clap enthusiastically.

  I sit next to Lulu and we have things to talk about. She’s nice. For a start, she’s enthusiastically home-schooling their son, who is just so incredibly clever that the children at the school he briefly went to have given him a hard time. Also she tells me about how she and Hugh got together: their mothers are friends, and as Hugh was well into his thirties and still showing no signs of settling down, and as Lulu was just emerging from a failed relationship, a plan was hatched to get them together. I can imagine the mothers, like Lulu, are no-nonsense, and hard to disobey. Hugh and Lulu have been happily married ever since.

  It’s nearly time to go. I sit listening to the CEO’s wife passionately advising Lulu, who’s keen on handicrafts, to—if she does nothing else while she’s here—go to Spotlight. I’m just reflecting on how any visit to Spotlight makes me lose the will to live, when Jane leans forward and says to Lulu and Hugh, ‘You should ask Linda about her idea for her TV series.’ They both look as if oh fuck has crossed their minds, but politeness sets in and they give me their listening faces.

  I think of Ken Duncum and how he’s given us at least one lecture on pitching our idea. I go for it. For five or 10 minutes I outline my idea and sell them my story. At the end I say to Hugh, ‘I can see you as Julian’, and he frowns petulantly and says he doesn’t think he’s quite old enough for that and I laugh insensitively and say, ‘Surely you could use makeup?’ But he’s empowered by the fact that a whole evening has passed in the company of the press and not one single person has even remotely referred to that unpleasant nonsense which is causing him such grief at home. He turns back to his amiable conversation with the CEO.

  But Lulu’s hand is on my arm. ‘Oh God,’ she’s saying. ‘Oh God I love it. I loved Blyton! I can see it. It’s wonderful. Oh God,’ she says again.

  It’s time for the evening to end, and Jane and I are about to be put in the corporate cab and sent back to our hotel. We will sit in Jane’s room and analyse the evening and finish off a bottle of wine, and I will say, ‘Jane, thank you. You’re a brick.’ Because as I go to say goodbye to our special guests, Lulu is grabbing my arm again and she’s saying, ‘Send it to me. I mean it. Send it to me.’

  I go back to Wellington and for the next month I work on my script, work on it, tightening it and polishing it. It’s a three-part television series. When I’m happy with it, finally, I print it out, put it in a box, kiss it goodbye and send it to my friend Lisa at SKY, who sends it on to Lulu.

  I tell people about it. I can’t wait!

  I wait. And I wait.

  I’m still waiting.

  But perhaps, in 10 years’ time, Hugh will be old enough.

  18.

  ON BEING

  GAUCHE

  How to be left-handed in a right-handed world

  2002. We’re looking for a house in Wellington. We’ve already been to several Open Homes. We’ve had a year in Khandallah while we decide not only if we want to live in Wellington but where. Robert has a contract with the Ministry for the Environment and it looks like it’ll last longer than the original 18 months.

  Of course we want to live in Wellington.

  For that year, we rent in a street called Rama Crescent. Our good fortune comes at the expense of another—we’re inadvertently caught up in some nasty post-marital discord. He decides to rent out their house. It comes as news to his ex-wife. We’ve been there only five or six weeks when the property manager phones to say, ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news!’ The bad news, which she delivers quite cheerfully, is that we’re going to have to move out. I don’t give her a lot of opportunity to give me the good news, which possibly, though not probably, is that Quinovic will pay our extensive expenses. Fortunately, the annoyed ex-wife, on whose side I am, in principle, agrees to allow us to stay.

  Every month or so, the street’s residents gather on the corner, at the point where Rama Crescent meets a street whose name has something to do with India, and they weed the retaining wall. They’ve already planted it with tasteful perennials which peek out from those hollow concrete blocks. They put a note in our letterbox inviting us to join them.

  Robert goes. He’s good like this. He’ll join in, do his bit affably but best of all competently. Not because of his PhD but his upbringing. I have a vague memory of making them all scones—I can see myself going out with them under a blue and white striped tea towel—but this may well be guilt speaking. I may have been inside imagining doing such a nice thing, but in reality watching the ferries go past the window and fantasising about a harbour full of sailing ships.

  We have terrific neighbours. On one side, she’s a lawyer. On the other side, he’s an engineer and she works for an organisation that stops people smoking. No—that encourages people to stop smoking. In Palmerston North, people have jobs like ours—teachers, scientists. Wellington jobs seem profoundly interesting. We have yet to experience, of course, the vagaries of working for the public service in the capital city.

  Across the road a house comes on the market, and it’s rumoured that the late owner was a Nazi war criminal. It’s one of the few houses in Wellington that has staff quarters; we go and look at its Open Home. It sits happily in a brown and orange time warp. The next day we’re invited for drinks with one of our neighbours, and I mention that we’ve been to look at the Nazi war criminal’s house. The lawyer next door says, ‘Linda—the alleged Nazi war criminal’s house.’

  We decide to stay, but we also decide to live nearer to town. This means going out every Sunday to visit Wellington’s appalling housing stock in our price range.

  I go straight to the bookshelves. I’m unlikely to want to buy a house from someone who has no bookshelves—extremely unlikely. I am a bit unlikely to buy a house from someone who has shelves, but filled with books by Jeffrey Archer and Danielle Steel. It simplifies our choice of houses, but probably not as much as does the fact that we’ve sold a very nice house in Palmerston North for about half the price
of a south-facing house at the bottom of a steep-sided valley in Wellington. One real estate agent, noticing us walking into a house that’s approximately twice our budget, calls out, ‘You won’t be able to afford this!’

  Every single house, even if it has just a handful of books, owns at least one by Bill Bryson.

  We find our house. It’s a house with lots and lots of steps. When we first moved to Wellington, I’d airily, ignorantly stated I’d never buy a house with steps. This one is only partway down a hill. At least it’s easier carrying groceries down rather than up. It’s optimistically described as having great sun. It’s certainly beautifully light. Trees on the skyline block what once would have been called a glimpse of the sea, and we can still see right across to distant hills. There’s lots of sky. There’s lots of trees. And the view it does have, of houses on the other side of the valley, makes me think of dolls’ houses. Thanks to living in Rama Crescent, I can fool myself that the lack of people mucking about in ships means that a view of the sea can be overrated. I also have a theory that the distance between the other side of Glenmore Street and us is some sort of perfect ratio: 1:12 or whatever that ratio might be. Far enough away to not care too much if you forget to take your dressing gown to the bathroom, close enough to see people carrying their groceries down their paths. On the bookshelves is Bill Bryson, and several other gratifyingly acceptable writers. We love it still.

  It appears I’m not alone in treasuring Bill Bryson. He comes to Wellington. I buy tickets: it’s packed. The decent chap chairing his session does one of those excessively thorough introductions and Bryson’s response is perfect: ‘Thank you for all those kind words.’ Never has the word all been used with such subtlety. Later in the street I inadvertently bang into him. He apologises. He has lived in Britain for too long.

  Not being able to sleep one recent night, with Robert sleeping the sleep of someone who starts their day with porridge and finishes it with pinot noir, I put in my earphones, go into podcast land, and click on something that comes up—a series about Penguin Writers. You’ll find it reasonably easily. A miracle: there’s a whole hour which involves someone pleasantly chatting to Bill Bryson. It’s suddenly worth being awake, and for that whole lovely hour I listen to his slightly plaintive voice discussing living in both the UK and the US.